Cohesion Measures for Aspect-Oriented Programs

概要

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Cohesion is an internal software attribute that can be used to indicate how tightly the modules of a software component are bound together in design and implementation. Cohesion is thought to be a desirable goal in software construction, leading to better values for external attributes such as maintainability, reusability, and reliability. Aspect-oriented software development (AOSD) is a new technique to support separation of concerns in software development. AOSD introduces a new kind of component called aspect which is like a class, also consisting of attributes (aspect instance variables) and those modules such as. advice, introduction, pointcuts, and methods. The cohesion for such an aspect is therefore about how tightly the attributes and modules of aspects cohere. To test this hypothesis, cohesion measures for aspects are needed. In this paper, we propose an approach to assessing the aspect cohesion based on dependence analysis. To this end, we present various types of dependencies between attributes and/or modules in an aspect, and the aspect dependence graph (ADG) to explicitly represent these dependencies. Based on the ADG, we formally define some aspect cohesion measures. We also discuss the properties of these dependencies, and according to these properties, we prove that these measures satisfy the properties that a good measure should have.
2004-03-18