Metrics-based design selection tool for aspect oriented software development

Abstract

Software metrics provide a means for software practitioners to assess the quality of their software. Ideally, this information should be available earlier in the software development lifecycle, since changes are much more expensive to incorporate in the later stages. Design level metrics offer an elegant way of capturing this information. Research in software design metrics has focused primarily on procedural and object oriented software. However, such metrics are currently not available for Aspect Oriented Software Development (AOSD), which is an emerging paradigm. Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) is an approach that allows programmers to modularize crosscutting concerns that are scattered across multiple modules. Separation of concerns through aspects has the advantages of increased reliability, adaptability and better reuse. The objective of this paper is to propose suitable metrics for the Aspect Oriented Design (AOD) and to develop a tool that will automatically select a better design based on the proposed metrics. In this paper, class and sequence diagrams are used to represent an AOD. The proposed design level metrics are applied to two alternative designs of an illustrative case study. The tool selects the design that better suits stakeholder requirements, based on logical inferences obtained from these metrics regarding the quality of the Aspect Oriented software.

A measurement framework for software product maturity assessment

“…Full conformance will render the product maturity level at the highest maturity Level 4, whereas deviation from full conformance will render the product maturity level at a lower level (with a decreasing scale as the deviation increases). Weighted operation in module (WOM) 54 "Counts the number of operations in a given module" Absolute MAXIMUM DIT (MaxDIT) 55,56 "It is the maximum of the DIT (depth of inheritance tree) values obtained for each class of the class diagram. The DIT value for a class within a generalization hierarchy is the longest path from the class to the root of the hierarchy."…”

An Assessment of Maintainability of an Aspect-Oriented System

“…This is the number of operations and fields that are accessed by a given class [34][35][36]. This can be represented by the number of outward arrows from a given module [36]. This metric is a combination of the CMC and CFA metrics as it measures the coupling based on both the field access (CFA) and operations (CMC).…”

“…This is the number of aspects containing advices triggered by the execution of operations in a given module. This is the number of inward arrows from aspects to a particular module [36]. This metric is used to measure the dependence of the operation on the advices; hence a change in the advice might impact the operation [8].…”

“…This metric is used to measure the dependence of the operation on the advices; hence a change in the advice might impact the operation [8]. A higher value of this metric for a given module means that the module is coupled with more aspects [36].…”

“…(ix) Response for Module (RFM). This is the number of operations that are executed by a given class in response to the messages received by a given class [34][35][36]. This includes operations that are called both implicitly and explicitly [34].…”