Communications of the ACM
A Metrics Suite for Object Oriented Design
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
An Empirical Study on Object-Oriented Metrics
METRICS '99 Proceedings of the 6th International Symposium on Software Metrics
Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Aspect-oriented software development
Empirical Validation of Object-Oriented Metrics on Open Source Software for Fault Prediction
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Exceptions and aspects: the devil is in the details
Proceedings of the 14th ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering
EJFlow: taming exceptional control flows in aspect-oriented programming
Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Aspect-oriented software development
Evolving software product lines with aspects: an empirical study on design stability
Proceedings of the 30th international conference on Software engineering
An Empirical Study of Maintainability in Aspect-Oriented System Evolution Using Coupling Metrics
TASE '08 Proceedings of the 2008 2nd IFIP/IEEE International Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Software Engineering
An exploratory study of fault-proneness in evolving aspect-oriented programs
Proceedings of the 32nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering - Volume 1
On the impact of aspectual decompositions on design stability: an empirical study
ECOOP'07 Proceedings of the 21st European conference on Object-Oriented Programming
The crosscutting impact of the AOSD Brazilian research community
Journal of Systems and Software
Role of aspect-oriented approach in dynamic adaptability
International Journal of Computer Applications in Technology
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Coupling metrics received increased recognition by object-oriented (OO) software developers when they were found to be indicators of important quality attributes, such as fault-proneness. However, there is no consensus on which coupling metrics are effective quality indicators for emerging development paradigms, such as Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP). AOP aims to improve software quality by providing significantly different decomposition mechanisms, such as pointcut, advice and intertype declarations. Therefore, it is not obvious if quality indicators for AOP can be derived from direct extensions of classical OO metrics. However, empirical studies of AOP do often rely on classical coupling metrics. Despite the recent adoption of AOP in industrial projects, coupling metrics have been rarely evaluated as useful indicators of fault-proneness in this context. This paper analyses the effectiveness of coupling metrics as indicators of fault-proneness in aspect-oriented (AO) systems. We collected faults from several releases of a real-world AO system. We applied and compared existing metrics for coupling and other internal attributes. We have also considered a novel metric that quantifies specific dependencies in AO software not captured by existing metrics. The results show that coupling metrics, which are not directives of object-oriented metrics, tended to be superior indicators of fault-proneness.