Managing crosscutting concerns during software evolution tasks

Baniassad, Elisa; Murphy, Gail C.; Schwanninger, Christa; Kircher, Michael

doi:10.1145/508386.508401

Cited by 32 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 20 publications

(11 reference statements)

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“…Developers' "as-needed" strategies tend to be more ad hoc, unplanned, and opportunistic [29]. It has been shown in a variety of contexts that the systematic strategies are more productive than the asneeded strategies [7], [32], [37], [45], but that developers generally use a combination of the two [4]. There is also evidence that successful developers (of varying definitions) write explicit implementation plans, including notes about relevant information as they find it during a task [30], [45].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Exploratory Study of How Developers Seek, Relate, and Collect Relevant Information during Software Maintenance Tasks

Myers

Coblenz

et al. 2006

IIEEE Trans. Software Eng.

580

336

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Abstract-Much of software developers' time is spent understanding unfamiliar code. To better understand how developers gain this understanding and how software development environments might be involved, a study was performed in which developers were given an unfamiliar program and asked to work on two debugging tasks and three enhancement tasks for 70 minutes. The study found that developers interleaved three activities. They began by searching for relevant code both manually and using search tools; however, they based their searches on limited and misrepresentative cues in the code, environment, and executing program, often leading to failed searches. When developers found relevant code, they followed its incoming and outgoing dependencies, often returning to it and navigating its other dependencies; while doing so, however, Eclipse's navigational tools caused significant overhead. Developers collected code and other information that they believed would be necessary to edit, duplicate, or otherwise refer to later by encoding it in the interactive state of Eclipse's package explorer, file tabs, and scroll bars. However, developers lost track of relevant code as these interfaces were used for other tasks, and developers were forced to find it again. These issues caused developers to spend, on average, 35 percent of their time performing the mechanics of navigation within and between source files. These observations suggest a new model of program understanding grounded in theories of information foraging and suggest ideas for tools that help developers seek, relate, and collect information in a more effective and explicit manner.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Exploratory Study of How Developers Seek, Relate, and Collect Relevant Information during Software Maintenance Tasks

Myers

Coblenz

et al. 2006

IIEEE Trans. Software Eng.

580

336

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…Baniassad et al [3] show evidence for the presence of crosscutting concerns in practice and how they are implemented without AOP. Three main types of such crosscutting concerns are identified as well as implementation strategies.…”

Section: Reusabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards reusable components with aspects

Hoffman¹,

Eugster²

2008

Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Software Engineering - ICSE '08

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The potential of aspect-oriented programming to represent cross-cutting concerns as reusable components has yet to be fully realized. Indeed, authors have detailed significant challenges in creating reusable aspect component libraries. Proposed solutions include restricting the power of aspects upfront, inferring concern interaction, and shaping base code to conform to abstract design rules. Another proposed strategy is to reduce obliviousness in return for increased modularity by extending AspectJ with explicit join points (EJPs).This paper presents the results of an empirical case study that aides in the understanding of the tradeoffs between obliviousness and modularity. We present a refactoring of the exception handling concern for three real-life Java applications to use EJPs instead of oblivious aspects. The empirical differences between this version and an equivalent oblivious version are analyzed. Finally, we present guiding principles on how to strike a favorable balance between obliviousness and modularity.

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“…An intentional view is a view in the sense that it provides only partial information and does not have to be explicit in the actual source code. 1 It is intentional as it describes the common characteristic of the entities belonging to a view in an abstract and intuitive way that clearly expresses the 'intent' of the view. More specifically, we describe this intent in a declarative (Prolog-like) programming language.…”

Section: Proposed Solutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Supporting software evolution with intentional software views

Mens¹,

Wermelinger²

2002

Proceedings of the International Workshop on Principles of Software Evolution - IWPSE '02

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Maintaining and evolving large software systems is hard. One underlying cause is that existing modularisation mechanisms are inadequate to handle crosscutting concerns. We propose intentional software views as an intuitive and lightweight means of modelling such concerns. They increase our ability to understand, modularise and browse the implementation by grouping together source-code entities that address a same concern. Alternative descriptions of the same intentional view can be provided and checked for consistency. In addition, the model supports the declaration, verification and enforcement of relations among intentional views. This facilitates software evolution by providing the ability to detect invalidation of important intentional relationships among concerns when the software is modified.

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Managing crosscutting concerns during software evolution tasks

Cited by 32 publications

References 20 publications

An Exploratory Study of How Developers Seek, Relate, and Collect Relevant Information during Software Maintenance Tasks

An Exploratory Study of How Developers Seek, Relate, and Collect Relevant Information during Software Maintenance Tasks

Towards reusable components with aspects

Supporting software evolution with intentional software views

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