Modularity Improvements with Aspect-Oriented Programming

Aspect-Oriented Programming is a topic of growing interest, since its presentation in 1997, and significant modularity improvement has, since then, been claimed as one of its main benefits, both by researchers and practitioners. The importance of modularity for maintenance and reuse which, consequently, are crucial for software development time and costs, emphasizes this programming paradigm, and strongly suggests its adoption by academia and industry. However, most of the claims on those benefits are, so far, qualitative, and only a small subset of them has quantitative grounds; therefore, any decision regarding where to adopt or not this paradigm is not yet sufficiently grounded. This dissertation presents a modularity quantitative evaluation of the Gang-of-Four Design Patterns functionally equivalent implementations, in Java and AspectJ, by Hannemann and Kiczales and, within this context, draws conclusions about the modularity improvements obtained with Aspect-Oriented Programming, which are expected to contribute to decisions on where this paradigm should or not be adopted. This evaluation is made with the Paradigm Independent Metrics (PIMETRICS), defined according to the Meta-Model Driven Measurement (M2DM) technique, and grounded at the Paradigm Independent Meta-model (PIMETA) which implements the Paradigm Independent Modularity Factors (PIFACTORS).MSc thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Computer Science (Mestrado em Informática