Research output: Contribution in Book/Report/Proceedings - With ISBN/ISSN › Conference contribution/Paper › peer-review
Research output: Contribution in Book/Report/Proceedings - With ISBN/ISSN › Conference contribution/Paper › peer-review
}
TY - GEN
T1 - Crosscutting Patterns and Design Stability: An Exploratory Analysis
AU - Figueiredo, Eduardo
AU - Silva, Bruno
AU - Sant'Anna, Claudio
AU - Garcia, Alessandro
AU - Whittle, Jon
AU - Nunes, Daltro
PY - 2009
Y1 - 2009
N2 - It is often claimed that inaccurate modularisation of crosscutting concerns hinders program comprehension and, as a consequence, leads to harmful software instabilities. However, recent studies have pointed out that crosscutting concerns are not always harmful to design stability. Hence, software maintainers would benefit from well documented patterns of crosscutting concerns and a better understanding about their actual impact on design stability. This paper presents a catalogue of crosscutting concern patterns recurrently observed in software systems. These patterns are described and classified based on an intuitive vocabulary that facilitates their recognition by software engineers. We analysed instances of the crosscutting patterns in object-oriented and aspect-oriented versions of three evolving programs. The outcomes of our exploratory evaluation indicated that: (i) a certain category of crosscutting patterns seems to be good indicator of harmful instabilities, and (ii) aspect-oriented solutions were unable to modularise concerns matching some crosscutting patterns.
AB - It is often claimed that inaccurate modularisation of crosscutting concerns hinders program comprehension and, as a consequence, leads to harmful software instabilities. However, recent studies have pointed out that crosscutting concerns are not always harmful to design stability. Hence, software maintainers would benefit from well documented patterns of crosscutting concerns and a better understanding about their actual impact on design stability. This paper presents a catalogue of crosscutting concern patterns recurrently observed in software systems. These patterns are described and classified based on an intuitive vocabulary that facilitates their recognition by software engineers. We analysed instances of the crosscutting patterns in object-oriented and aspect-oriented versions of three evolving programs. The outcomes of our exploratory evaluation indicated that: (i) a certain category of crosscutting patterns seems to be good indicator of harmful instabilities, and (ii) aspect-oriented solutions were unable to modularise concerns matching some crosscutting patterns.
U2 - 10.1109/ICPC.2009.5090037
DO - 10.1109/ICPC.2009.5090037
M3 - Conference contribution/Paper
SN - 978-1-4244-3998-0
SP - 138
EP - 147
BT - Program Comprehension, 2009. ICPC '09. IEEE 17th International Conference on
PB - IEEE
CY - New York
T2 - IEEE 17th International Conference on Program Comprehension
Y2 - 17 May 2009 through 19 May 2009
ER -