Towards a unified coupling framework for measuring aspect-oriented programs

  • Authors:

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

  • Affiliations:

  • Kiel University of Applied Sciences;Lancaster University;Lancaster University;Lancaster University

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 3rd international workshop on Software quality assurance
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

There is nowadays a wide recognition that low coupling is a main tenet in the measurement of high-quality modular software. In fact, coupling is one of the few internal software attributes that has been both theoretically and empirically shown to have a large impact on a variety of external software qualities, such as reusability, maintainability, evolvability and testability. Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) is an emerging technique that advocates enhanced modularization of certain widely-scoped system properties, the so-called crosscutting concerns. However, there is a poor common understanding of coupling in the context of AOP. Most of the existing metrics and assessment frameworks concentrate on the coupling evaluation of the AspectJ programming language. In addition, they took their own particular view of what coupling means in this particular language. This paper presents the definition of a generic coupling framework that takes into account both AspectJ and CaesarJ, two representatives of the most well-known families of available AOP languages. The current version of the proposed framework allows for the definition of different coupling metrics, which in turn permits the analysis and comparison of Java, AspectJ and CaesarJ implementations. We also illustrate how the framework can be applied to the characterization of existing coupling metrics.