Revealing architecturally-relevant flaws in aspectual decompositions

Abstract

Although aspect-oriented programming (AOP) aims to improve the software modularity, developers can unwittingly introduce code smells in their programs. Even though a few code smells for AOP have been reported in the literature, there is no evidence whether and how they occur in evolving software projects. There is also little knowledge on their actual impact on architecture degeneration, such as their correlation with architecturally-relevant flaws. Therefore, in this research we investigate which AOP smells occur in evolving software systems and how their (co-)occurrence are usually associated with architecturally-relevant flaws. The basic idea is to equip AOP developers with analysis techniques for the source code that exploit the architectural design information.