Change impact analysis for AspectJ programs

Abstract

Change impact analysis is a useful technique for software evolution. It determines the effects of a source editing session and provides valuable feedbacks to the programmers for making correct decisions. Recently, many techniques have been proposed to support change impact analysis of procedural or object-oriented software, but seldom effort has been made for aspect-oriented software. In this paper we propose a new change impact analysis technique for AspectJ programs. At the core of our approach is the atomic change representation which can precisely capture semantic differences between two versions of an AspectJ program. We also present a change impact model, based on static AsepctJ call graph construction, to determine the impacted program parts, affected tests and their responsible affecting changes. As an application of change impact analysis, we discuss how our model can help programmers locate the exact failure reason by narrowing down those affecting changes when debugging AspectJ programs.The proposed techniques have been implemented in Celadon, a change impact analysis framework for AspectJ programs. We performed an experimental evaluation of the proposed techniques on 24 versions of 8 AspectJ benchmarks. The results show that our proposed technique can effectively perform change impact analysis and provide valuable debugging information for AspectJ programs.

Systems Evolution and Software Reuse in Object-Oriented Programming and Aspect-Oriented Programming

“…Evolvability and reusability like other quality factors are difficult to measure. Our dependent variables are based on previous studies performed by Zhang et al [40], Ryder & Tip [32] and Frakes [12]. It is possible that other metrics will be better fitted for the purpose of our study.…”

“…The evolution metric we use is based on previous studies performed by Zhang et al. [40] and Ryder & Tip [32]. In their work, the difficulty of evolvability is defined in terms of atomic changes to the modules in a program.…”

“…At the core of this approach is the ability to transform source code edits into a set of atomic changes, which captures the semantic differences between two releases of a program. Zhang et al [40] presented a catalog of atomic changes for AspectJ programs. For the purpose of our study, we have slightly modified their catalog.…”

AutoFlow: An automatic debugging tool for AspectJ software

“…We implemented the change impact analysis module based on our Celadon [7] framework. This module decomposes the source editing into a set of atomic changes [4,8]. The atomic changes generated in this module are used to reflect the semantic differences between the initial and updated software version.…”

Aspect-oriented software development

“…We consider the atomic changes as proposed by [10,8] for the base system, and, by [18] for the aspect part. A set of atomic changes that is able to reproduce the difference between v0 and v1 is computed by comparing the abstract syntax trees of the two versions of the program and by finding their differences.…”