An exploratory study of the effect of aspect-oriented programming on maintainability

In this paper we describe an exploratory assessment of the effect of aspect-oriented programming on software maintainability. An experiment was conducted in which 11 software professionals were asked to carry out maintenance tasks on one of two programs. The first program was written in Java and the second in AspectJ. Both programs implement a shopping system according to the same set of requirements. A number of statistical hypotheses were tested. The results did seem to suggest a slight advantage for the subjects using the object-oriented system since in general it took the subjects less time to answer the questions on this system. Also, both systems appeared to be equally difficult to modify. However, the results did not show a statistically significant influence of aspect-oriented programming at the 5% level. We are aware that the results of this single small study cannot be generalized. We conclude that more empirical research is necessary in this area to identify the benefits of aspect-oriented programming and we hope that this paper will encourage such research.

Rachel HarrisonEmail:

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Marc Bartsch   studied at the University of Munster, Germany, and received the 1. State exam in Computer Science, Mathematics and English. He also received the MA degree in German Studies from the University of Washington, Seattle. He has more than three years experience as a C++ programmer at Vodafone Information Systems, Germany and is currently a PhD candidate in Computer Science at the University of Reading, UK. His research interests are in the area of empirical software engineering, including aspect-oriented programming and validation of aspect-oriented metrics. Marc Bartsch is member of the BCS. Rachel Harrison   obtained her MA degree in Mathematics from Oxford University, an MSc degree in Computer Science from University College London, and a PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of Southampton. Her current research interests center around empirical software engineering, particularly measurement and modeling of the aspect-oriented paradigm, and the assessment of risk in requirements engineering. Prof. Harrison is currently a Visiting Professor at the University of Reading and Managing Director of Stratton Edge Consulting. She is a member of the IEEE Computer Society, the ACM and the BCS and is also a Chartered Engineer.