Inquiring the usage of aspect-oriented programming: an empirical study

International audienceBack in 2001, the MIT announced aspect-orientedprogramming as a key technology in the next 10 years.Nowadays, 8 years later, AOP is not widely adopted.Several reasons can explain this distrust in front ofAOP, and one of them is the lack of robust tools foranalysis, testing and maintenance. In order to developdedicated solutions for assisting the development withAOP, and increase its adoption, we need to understandhow it is actually used. In this paper we analyze 38aspect-oriented open source projects with respect tothe impact of aspects on the projects, and to coverageof the language features. This reveals that AOP iscurrently used in a cautious way. This work is a firststep to built support and development tools dedicatedto actual practices for AOP, based on empirical usage profiles