Abstract
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 compromise 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 OO and aspect-oriented implementations of classical patterns with respect to fundamental software engineering attributes, such as coupling and cohesion. This paper presents a quantitative study that compares Java and AspectJ solutions for the 23 Gang-of-Four patterns. We have used stringent software attributes as the assessment criteria. We have found that most aspect-oriented solutions improve separation of pattern-related concerns, although only four aspect-oriented implementations have exhibited significant reuse. This paper also discusses the scalability of the analyzed solutions with respect to separation of concerns, and the determination of a predictive model for the modularization of design patterns with aspects.
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Garcia, A., Sant’Anna, C., Figueiredo, E., Kulesza, U., Lucena, C., von Staa, A. (2006). Modularizing Design Patterns with Aspects: A Quantitative Study. In: Rashid, A., Aksit, M. (eds) Transactions on Aspect-Oriented Software Development I. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3880. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11687061_2
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