An empirical evaluation of coupling metrics on aspect-oriented programs

Abstract

Coupling metrics received increased recognition by objectoriented (OO) software developers when they were found to be indicators of important quality attributes, such as faultproneness. 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.

The Impact of Coupling on the Fault-Proneness of Aspect-Oriented Programs: An Empirical Study

“…Following recent studies [23,27], we target four releases of each system in our evaluation. These releases are iBATIS 01, 01.3, 01.5 and 02 3 , HealthWatcher 01, 04, 07 and 10 and MobileMedia 01, 02, 03 and 06.…”

“…Our previous work [23] compared the fault prediction ability of existing AOP metrics [11] with a novel, combined metric that takes into account the several coupling forms between aspects and the base code. Results showed that metrics that take into account fine-grained coupling connections created from aspect-base interactions outperformed the traditional metrics for predicting faults in AO systems.…”

On the Relationship Between Feature Dependencies and Change Propagation

“…Software metrics have been widely used in the object-oriented software development in order to improve software maintainability [DANTAS et al 2012]. Recently, some of these metrics were adapted to the context of aspect-oriented programming [CHIDAMBER and KEMERER 1994, HENDERSON-SELLERS 1995, ETZKORN and DELUGACH 2000, SANT'ANNA et al 2003, CECCATO and TONELLA 2004, BURROWS et al 2010 and feature-oriented programming [BARTOLOMEI et al 2006.…”

“…To cite just a few in the context of compositional approaches, Burrows et al proposed a novel metric to specific dependencies in aspect-oriented software systems that were not captured by conventional metrics [BURROWS et al 2010]. In addition, Dantas and colleagues proposed some metrics and conducted an exploratory evaluation about the impact of specific programming techniques on change propagation .…”

“…Burrows et al proposed a novel metric to specific dependencies in aspect-oriented software systems that were not captured by conventional metrics [BURROWS et al 2010]. …”