Design patterns as aspects: a quantitative assessment

• Autor(a) principal: Sant'Anna,Cláudio
• Data de Publicação: 2004
• Outros Autores: Garcia,Alessandro, Kulesza,Uirá, Lucena,Carlos, Staa,Arndt von
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Journal of the Brazilian Computer Society
• Texto Completo: http://old.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0104-65002004000300004
• topic: Design patterns; aspect-oriented programming; metrics

Design patterns offer flexible solutions to common problems in software development. Recent studies have shown that several design patterns involve crosscutting concerns. Unfortunately, object-oriented (OO) abstractions are often not able to modularize those crosscutting concerns, which in turn decrease the system reusability and maintainability. Hence, it is important verifying whether aspect-oriented approaches support improved modularization of crosscutting concerns relative to design patterns. Ideally, quantitative studies should be performed to compare object-oriented and aspect-oriented implementations of classical patterns with respect to important software engineering attributes, such as coupling and cohesion. This paper presents a quantitative study that compares aspect-based and OO solutions for a representative set of design patterns. We have used stringent software engineering attributes as the assessment criteria. We have found that most aspect-oriented solutions improve separation of pattern-related concerns, although some aspect-oriented implementations of specific patterns resulted in higher coupling and more lines of code.