Abstract-Static type systems play an essential role in contemporary programming languages. Despite their importance, whether static type systems influence human software development capabilities remains an open question. One frequently mentioned argument for static type systems is that they improve the maintainability of software systems-an often used claim for which there is no empirical evidence. This paper describes an experiment which tests whether static type systems improve the maintainability of software systems. The results show rigorous empirical evidence that static type are indeed beneficial to these activities, except for fixing semantic errors.

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Aspect-oriented software development is an approach which addresses the construction of software artefacts which traditional software engineering constructs fail to modularize: the so-called crosscutting concerns. However, although aspect-orientation claims to permit a better modularization of crosscutting concerns, it is still not clear whether the application of aspect-oriented constructs has a measurable, positive impact on the construction of software artefacts. This paper addresses this issue by an empirical study which compares the specification of crosscutting concerns using traditional composition techniques and aspect-oriented composition techniques using the object-oriented programming language Java and the aspect-oriented programming language AspectJ.