Welcome to Arcan Documentation

Arcan is an automatic tool for software quality analysis and (Architectural) Technical Debt detection, evaluation and visualisation.

Arcan helps you keep Technical Debt under control and avoid its shortcomings. The tool analyses 5 programming languages and integrates into your CI pipeline to ensure that your code continuously meets high-quality standards.

The analysis is available for the following programming languages:

Java
C
C++
C#
Python

More languages are coming next!

Architectural Technical Debt

The backbone of a software system is its architecture. Software architectures need to continuously update, adapt and change. Software maintenance and evolution become expensive, time-consuming, and sometimes impossible if architecture quality is not continuously assessed.

The accumulation of sub-optimal architectural solutions inside a software system results in the growth of Architectural Technical Debt, a segment of a bigger problem (Technical Debt) that costs 500 billion dollars worldwide.

33% of the time of a developer is wasted to manage technical debt.

This problem manifests itself in specific contexts, for instance when there is the need to migrate an obsolete technology or when there is the need to fast scale up the number of features of a software application. However, the deepest sources causing this problem can hardly be detected by hand, and software developers lack the tools to detect them.

We offer a platform for automatic source code analysis that assesses the quality of software architectures in a few minutes. Arcan indicates the exact pain points in the code so that developers can fix them and make the code easy to program. The most innovative facet of Arcan is the ability to extract strategic data regarding Architectural Technical Debt so that managers can make informed decisions about software production and optimization.

The developer coefficent

Architectural Smells

A symptom of Architectural Technical Debt is the presence of Architectural Smells, design decisions that negatively impact the system internal quality. Arcan main aim is to automatically detect Architectural Smells, indicate where they are located in code and suggest best practices about how to remove them. Refactoring Architectural Smells is the activity of removing Architectural Smells from the system by reorganising the code and/or the architecture of the affected artefacts according to a new design. This is a effortful activity, thus it is only adopted as the last resort. Typically, it is preferred to avoid at all the introduction of Technical Debt (e.g. Architectural Smells) by ensuring only clean new code is committed to the codebase.

Architectural Smells come in different types. Here you can find the updated lists of the ones detected by Arcan and here are the descriptions of the best practices to remove them.

Getting started

To download our 30-days trial, please visit www.arcan.tech. You will need docker installed on your machine to run Arcan, but don't worry! You don’t need to know how Docker works to use Arcan.

You can also have a quick look to the tool with the Arcan online demo.

Resources

Get a yearly license

Arcan is distributed on-premise and in the cloud with yearly licence. Pricing depends on the size of the application portfolio to analyse and the number of needed floating licenses.

Contact us at info@arcan.tech or leave a message on our website to get a quote.

Community and Support

If you find a bug or want to suggest a new feature create a new issue on Github: https://github.com/Arcan-Tech/arcan-issues-public. If you need further support or want to know more about Arcan, contact us at info@arcan.tech or leave a message on our website or join us on Discord.