UNIFIED COHESION MEASURES FOR ASPECT-ORIENTED SYSTEMS

摘要

Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) is an emerging technique that provides a means to clearly encapsulate and implement aspects that crosscut other modules. However, despite an interesting body of work for measuring cohesion in Aspect-Oriented (AO) Systems, there is poor understanding of cohesion in the context of AOP. Most of the proposed cohesion assessment frameworks and metrics for AOP are for AspectJ programming language. In this paper, we have defined a generic cohesion framework that takes into account, two well-known families of available AOP languages viz, AspectJ and CaesarJ. This unified framework contributes in better understanding of cohesion in AO technology, which can contribute in (i) comparing measures and their potential use, (ii) integrating different existing measures, which examine the same concept in different ways, and (iii) defining new cohesion metrics, which in turn permits the analysis and comparison of Java, AspectJ and CaesarJ implementations. Correlation analysis between cohesion and changeability has also been performed. The correlation factor value indicates that cohesion cannot be used as an indicator of changeability.