Abstract
Design models represent modular realizations of stakeholders’ concerns and communicate the design decisions to be implemented by developers. Unfortunately, they often suffer from inconsistency problems. Aspect-oriented modeling (AOM) aims at promoting better modularity. However, there is no empirical knowledge about its impact on the inconsistency detection effort. To address this gap, this work investigates the effects of AOM on: (1) the developers’ effort to detect inconsistencies; (2) the inconsistency detection rate; and (3) the interpretation of design models in the presence of inconsistencies. A controlled experiment was conducted with 26 subjects and involved the analysis of 520 models. The results, supported by statistical tests, show that the effort of detecting inconsistencies is 20 percent lower in AO models than in their OO counterparts. On the other hand, the inconsistency detection rate and the number of misinterpretations are 43 and 37 percent higher in AO models than in OO models, respectively.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Levine, D., Ramsey, P., Smidt, R.: Applied Statistics for Engineers and Scientists. Duxbury (1999)
Lange, C., Chaudron, M.: An Empirical Assessment of Completeness in UML Designs. In: 8th Empirical Assessment in Software Engineering 2004, pp. 111–121 (2004)
Lange, C., Chaudron, M.: Effects of Defects in UML Models – An Experimental Investigation. In: International Conference on Software Engineering 2006, Shangai, China, pp. 401–410 (May 2006)
Kitchenham, B., et al.: Evaluating Guidelines for Reporting Empirical Software Engineering Studies. Empirical Software Engineering 13(1), 97–112 (2008)
Wohlin, et al.: Experimentation in Software Engineering: an Introduction. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Norwell (2000)
Farias, K., Garcia, A., Whittle, J.: Assessing the Impact of Aspects on Model Composition Effort. In: Aspect-Oriented Software Development 2010, Saint Malo, France, pp. 73–84 (2010)
Clarke, S., Banaissad, E.: Aspect-Oriented Analysis and Design the Theme Approach. Addison-Wesley, Upper Saddle River (2005)
France, R., Rumpe, B.: Model-Driven Development of Complex Software: A Research Roadmap. In: Future of Software Engineering at ICSE 2007, pp. 37–54 (2007)
Evaluating the Impact of Aspects on Inconsistency Detection Effort: a Controlled Experiment (2012), http://www.les.inf.puc-rio.br/opus/models2012-aom
Filman, R., Friedman, D.: Aspect-Oriented Programming is Quantification and Obliviousness. In: RIACS (2000)
OMG, Unified Modeling Language: Infrastructure, v2.2, Object Management Group (February 2010)
Whittle, J., Jayaraman, P.: Synthesizing Hierarchical State Machines from Expressive Scenario Descriptions. ACM TOSEMÂ 19(3) (January 2010)
Klein, J., Hélouët, L., Jézéquel, J.: Semantic-based Weaving of Scenarios. In: 5th Aspect-Oriented Software Development, Bonn, Germany (March 2006)
AspectJ (2011), http://www.eclipse.org/aspectj
Dobing, B., Parsons, J.: How UML is Used. Communications of the ACM 49(5), 109–113 (2006)
Brun, Y., Holmes, R., Ernst, M., Notkin, D.: Proactive Detection of Collaboration Conflicts. In: 8th SIGSOFT ESEC/FSE, Szeged, Hungary, pp. 168–178 (2011)
Losavio, F., Matteo, A., Morantes, P.: UML Extensions for Aspect Oriented Software Development. Journal of Object Technology 8(5), 85–104 (2009)
Wimmer, M., Schauerhuber, A., Kappel, G., Retschitzegger, W., Schwinger, W., Kapsammer, E.: A survey on UML-based aspect-oriented design modeling. ACM Computing Survey 43(4), 1–33 (2012)
Aldawud, O., Elrad, T., Bader, A.: A UML Profile for Aspect- Oriented Software Development. In: Workshop on Aspect-Oriented Modeling at AOSD (2003)
Chavez, C., Lucena, C.: A Metamodel for Aspect-Oriented Modeling. In: Workshop on Aspect-Oriented Modeling with the UML, at AOSD 2002, Netherlands (April 2002)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Farias, K., Garcia, A., Lucena, C. (2012). Evaluating the Impact of Aspects on Inconsistency Detection Effort: A Controlled Experiment. In: France, R.B., Kazmeier, J., Breu, R., Atkinson, C. (eds) Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems. MODELS 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7590. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33666-9_15
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33666-9_15
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-33665-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-33666-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)