# Enterprise Architecture Smells > Detecting structural problems in an enterprise application from evidence, and telling genuine harm apart from unfamiliar-but-fine: anaemic domain models, god services, transaction-script sprawl, generic repositories, excessive layering and DTO mapping, leaky abstractions, distributed monoliths, persistence leakage, and abstractions that only move complexity. Use when reviewing an architecture or a large pull request, when adding a field touches seven files, when a "clean architecture" refactor is being proposed, when an interface has one implementation, when a wrapper adds no behaviour, when a pattern is being applied because it is a pattern, when a codebase feels wrong but nobody can say why, or when deciding whether an abstraction is worth keeping. Does not cover the migration once a smell is confirmed (architecture-refactoring-paths, legacy-enterprise-modernization), performance diagnosis (architecture-and-performance), or the individual patterns' own guidance. - Skill: `robsonkades/enterprise-architecture-smells` (Agent Skill, multi-file: 4 files) - Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add robsonkades/enterprise-architecture-smells` - Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/robsonkades/enterprise-architecture-smells/raw - Safety review: pending - Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex - Category: Coding & Dev Tools - Author: robsonkades (https://skillmd.com/u/robsonkades) - Updated: 2026-09-17 - Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/robsonkades/enterprise-architecture-smells --- # Enterprise Architecture Smells ## Purpose Turn architectural unease into findings with evidence, and stop the two opposite mistakes that reviews make: declaring a smell because a structure is unfamiliar, and missing one because every individual file looks reasonable. A smell is not a defect. It is a **symptom that warrants investigation**, and it becomes a finding only when a concrete harm can be named: a change that is riskier, a caller that can break, a test that cannot be written, a cost that is being paid for nothing. ## Workflow 1. **Observe, do not diagnose.** Record what is actually there: file counts per change, layer counts, imports, method bodies that only forward. 2. **Find the evidence in the history**, not only in the code. `git log` on a suspected god class suggests whether unrelated features edit it; inspect the diffs and use cases to distinguish cohesive work from competing responsibilities. 3. **Name the harm.** Which future change is riskier? Which bug does this shape allow? If no harm can be named, drop the finding rather than softening it into a nitpick. 4. **Cost the fix.** Splitting costs navigation and wiring; adding an abstraction costs indirection. If the fix plausibly costs more than the harm, record it as an observation and say so. 5. **Check the acceptable case.** Every smell in the catalogue has a situation in which it is the right design. Check that situation before writing the finding. 6. **Order by impact and give the concrete first edit**, not a target architecture. Inspect the project's JDK, persistence namespace/version, Spring proxy/transaction configuration and public contracts before recommending Java-specific edits. This skill has no executable Java baseline; examples are partial shapes or policy snippets, not standalone programs. Do not upgrade dependencies to apply them. If history or runtime evidence is unavailable, state the missing evidence and a discriminating check; do not invent a confirmed finding. ## The two failure modes of a review ```text False positive: "this violates the pattern" A structure is unfamiliar or non-canonical, and the review recommends a refactor with no named harm. Cost is real, benefit is aesthetic. False negative: "each file looks fine" Every class is reasonable in isolation; the problem is in the relationships. Trace representative changes and runtime paths; file/layer/forwarding counts help select where to investigate. ``` ## Decision rules ```text An abstraction exists with one implementation and no inversion → inspect narrowing, policy, compatibility and extension contracts before treating the indirection as waste (enterprise-base-patterns). Adding a field touches many files → inspect why each changes: migrations, tests and independent contracts can justify them. Investigate duplicate responsibility and manual mapping drift (remote-facade-and-dto). A class is edited by every feature team for unrelated reasons → investigate competing responsibilities and concrete change conflicts. Rules are enforced in services and entities have only accessors → anaemic model — a finding ONLY if a domain model was the right choice here (domain-logic-organization). Two services must be deployed together → distinguish contract incompatibility from release policy or a temporary migration; assess lost deployment independence and actual operational cost (distribution-boundaries). A persistence type appears in a controller signature or an API payload → inspect exposed fields, serialization and lazy access; mapping annotations alone do not make every column the wire contract. An abstraction's only stated purpose is hypothetical portability → compare present cost with a concrete supported migration contract; do not assume future use or non-use (architecture-decision-making). The codebase is unfamiliar but consistent, and change is cheap → not a finding. Consistency has value; personal preference does not. ``` ## Rules - **Evidence first.** Line counts, method counts and import counts are prompts to look at the history, never findings by themselves. A cohesive 900-line class may be less costly to change than a 200-line class serving conflicting responsibilities; verify actual harm. - **Files touched per feature is a screening metric.** Group commits by actual feature/PR, separate generated files, tests and migrations, and compare similar changes. Squashes, formatting, renames and unrelated bundled work distort counts; corroborate with diffs, incidents, lead time or repeated correction sites. Twenty matching commits is a sample, not a confidence guarantee. - An abstraction can remove duplication and accidental complexity as well as move costs. Compare caller simplicity with configuration, maintenance and onboarding costs; do not assume complexity is a conserved quantity. - Anaemia is only a smell where a rich model was the right choice. Over transaction scripts with a gateway, "entities with no behaviour" is the design, correctly applied (`domain-logic-organization`). - **A wrapper must justify its boundary.** Translation, narrowing, policy, independent ownership or compatibility may justify forwarding. Inspect annotations and interceptors before concluding that an empty-looking body contributes nothing. - Investigate both unnecessary patterns and missing boundaries. Ask "what would this cost if we deleted it?" as well as "what is missing?"; neither category is a defect by itself. - Change frequency affects maintenance priority, but stable modules can still impose security, correctness, availability or operating costs. Rank observed harm and exposure alongside change cost; stability alone neither requires nor rules out a fix. - Do not recommend a target architecture. Recommend the next edit, with the harm it removes. Wholesale rewrites are how a real finding becomes a six-month project that stalls (`architecture-refactoring-paths`). - Distinguish accidental from essential complexity. Evaluate whether distributed consistency is required before defending a saga, and whether shared repository behavior serves real callers before rejecting genericity. Name the capability that removal would lose. ## Finding format Observation → harm → evidence/confidence → first edit → validation → what to avoid. > **Observation:** `OrderService` (3 240 lines, 11 collaborators) contains the pricing rules, > which also appear in `QuoteService` and the nightly re-rate job. > **Harm:** the last two pricing incidents were a rule changed in one of the three places. > The next rule change carries the same risk. > **Evidence:** `git log` shows 47 commits in 6 months from 5 teams; 9 touch pricing, and 6 > of those touch exactly two of the three sites. > **First edit:** extract `Pricing` as a domain type with the discount chain, and have all > three call it. Do not move anything else. > **Validation:** preserve pricing outcomes at all three entry points, including rounding > and rejected inputs; verify that one representative rule change updates one policy site. > **Avoid:** splitting `OrderService` by layer first — that reshuffles the duplication > without removing it. ## References - [Smell catalogue](references/smell-catalogue.md) — each smell with symptoms, cause, consequences, a detection command or query, the refactoring direction, and the situation in which it is actually acceptable. Read when investigating a specific suspicion. - [Pattern overuse](references/pattern-overuse.md) — the abstractions that cost more than they return: interface-per-class, generic repositories, mapping chains, speculative plugin points, premature services and premature domain models; with the questions that decide whether an abstraction stays, and how to remove one safely. Read when deciding whether something should exist at all.