During maintenance and particularly during corrective and perfective tasks, systems tend to exhibit a weight gain. As a result, their quality tends to degrade. Software comprehension is vital in order to assess system quality. In this paper, we aim at deploying dynamic analysis of Ada programs for obtaining comprehension, and applying measurements to assess their quality. Program instrumentation is performed non-intrusively by AspectAda, an aspect-oriented extension to Ada which we discussed in earlier work. Events which are required for this analysis are captured as execution traces. We have defined a relational database schema to save execution traces, and a set of queries to obtain measures of quality metrics. New Ada-specific metrics are introduced and existing metrics have been adopted from the literature. Automation is also provided as a proof of concept through a prototypical tool which provides information on the runtime behavior of the system, performs measurements and provides visualization of the run-time behavior of the system through a call graph. An open source Ada program is used as a case study to demonstrate our approach.

It has now been over a decade since the introduction of Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP). As the AspectJ programming language (being one of the notable technologies of AOP) gains acceptance in industry and academia, its comprehensibility property is an important factor in determining an eventual wide acceptance by practitioners in development and maintenance as well as by educators who aim at introducing AOP into their curricula. Our objective is to improve program comprehension by identifying and addressing potential pitfalls in code which tend to make comprehension not intuitive. In those subtle places, we observe the behavior of the program to see the degree to which it matches the expected results. In cases where a conflict occurs, we provide a reasoning to point out where it would originate from, and a resolution to the conflict where applicable.