On the Maintainability of Aspect-Oriented Software: A Concern-Oriented Measurement Framework

  • Authors:

  • Eduardo Figueiredo;Claudio Sant'Anna;Alessandro Garcia;Thiago T. Bartolomei;Walter Cazzola;Alessandro Marchetto

  • Affiliations:

  • Computing Department, Lancaster University, United Kingdom, e.figueiredo@lancaster.ac.uk;Computer Science Department, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro - PUC-Rio, Brazil, claudios@inf.puc-rio.br;Computing Department, Lancaster University, United Kingdom, a.garcia@lancaster.ac.uk;Generative Software Development Lab, University of Waterloo, Canada, ttonelli@uwaterloo.ca;Dipartimento di Informatica e Comunicazione, Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy, cazzola@dico.unimi.it;Fondazione Bruno Kessler - IRST, Trento, Italy, marchetto@fbk.eu

  • Venue:
  • CSMR '08 Proceedings of the 2008 12th European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering
  • Year:
  • 2008

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Aspect-oriented design needs to be systematically assessed with respect to modularity flaws caused by the realization of driving system concerns, such as tangling, scattering, and excessive concern dependencies. As a result, innovative concern metrics have been defined to support quantitative analyses of concern's properties. However, the vast majority of these measures have not yet being theoretically validated and managed to get accepted in the academic or industrial settings. The core reason for this problem is the fact that they have not been built by using a clearly-defined terminology and criteria. This paper defines a concern-oriented framework that supports the instantiation and comparison of concern measures. The framework subsumes the definition of a core terminology and criteria in order to lay down a rigorous process to foster the definition of meaningful and well-founded concern measures. In order to evaluate the framework generality, we demonstrate the framework instantiation and extension to a number of concern measures suites previously used in empirical studies of aspect-oriented software maintenance.