Unweaving the impact of aspect changes in AspectJ

Abstract

Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) fosters the coding of tangled concerns in separated units that are then woven together in the executable system. Unfortunately, the oblivious nature of the weaving process makes difficult to figure out the augmented system behavior. It is difficult, for example, to understand the effect of a change just by reading the source code. In this paper, we focus on detecting the run time impact of the editing actions on a given set of test cases. Our approach considers two versions of an AspectJ program and a test case. Our tool, implemented on top of the abc weaver and the AJANA framework is able to map semantics changes to the atomic editing changes in the source code.