On the Necessity of Empirical Studies in the Assessment of Modularization Mechanisms for Crosscutting Concerns

kaestner@cs.cmu.edu (S. Apel, C. Kästner, S. Trujillo)
Sat, 05 Mar 2016 18:41:39 -0500

Sven Apel, Christian Kästner, and Salvador Trujillo. On the Necessity of Empirical Studies in the Assessment of Modularization Mechanisms for Crosscutting Concerns. In Proceedings of the ICSE Workshop on Assessment of Contemporary Modularization Techniques (ACoM), Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Computer Society, May 2007.

Collaborations are a frequently occurring class of crosscutting concerns. Prior work has argued that collaborations are better implemented using Collaboration Languages (CLs) rather than AspectJ-like Languages (ALs). The main argument is that aspects flatten the objectoriented structure of a collaboration, and introduce more complexity rather than benefits – in other words, CLs and ALs differ with regard to program comprehension. To explore the effects of CL and AL modularization mechanisms on program comprehension, we propose to conduct a series of experiments. We present ideas on how to arrange such experiments that should serve as a starting point and foster a discussion with other researchers.