Metrics for Evolution of Aspect Oriented Software
This work addresses the need for quantitative measurement of software evolution in Aspect Oriented development, which is incremental as it focuses on defining metrics for a specific methodology.
The paper tackles the problem of quantifying the evolution of Aspect Oriented software by defining a new set of metrics, and applies these metrics to analyze the evolution of AJHotDraw across four versions.
Aspect Oriented Software Development (AOSD) is a promising methodology which provides powerful techniques to improve the modularity of the software by separating the cross-cutting concerns from the core functionality. Since evolution is a major requirement for the sustainability of any software, it is necessary to quantitatively measure its impact. In order to quantify, it is essential to define metrics that will capture the evolution of Aspect Oriented (AO) software. It is also necessary to compare the metric values of various versions of software to draw inferences on the evolution dynamics of AO software. This needs identification of artifacts that were added, deleted or modified across versions and study the consequence of these types of changes. This paper defines a new set of metrics for measuring the evolution of Aspect Oriented software. As a case study, an aspect refactored software, AJHotDraw has been chosen and its four versions have been analyzed for their capability to evolve over time.