Among the maintainability sub-characteristics, changeability plays a critical role in analyzing the maintainability of software. Changeability is highly influenced by the dependencies that exist between the components of a system. Therefore, we need to have measurement mechanisms that can take into account the dependencies between components so as to determine the ease which modifications can be made to given software. This paper attempts to investigate the usefulness of three coupling metrics (CBO, Ce, and Ca) and one size/complexity metric (WMC) as predictors of changeability. The assessment is based on a case study of open source software known as OpenBravoPOS which is commonly used in the retail business and developed in Java. The results show that some of the coupling metrics can be used as good predictors of changeability.
Software maintenance is an important activity in software development. Some development methodologies such as the object-oriented have contributed in improving maintainability of software. However, crosscutting concerns are still challenges that affect the maintainability of OO software. In this paper, we discuss our case study to assess the extent of maintainability improvement that can be achieved by employing aspect-oriented programming. Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) is a relatively new approach that emphasizes dealing with crosscutting concerns. To demonstrate the maintainability improvement, we refactored a COTS-based system known as OpenBravoPOS using AspectJ and compared its maintainability with the original OO version. We used both structural complexity and concern level metrics. Our results show an improvement of maintainability in the AOP version of OpenBravoPOS.
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