Design Level Metrics to Measure the Complexity Across Versions of AO Software

TL;DR

This paper introduces design level metrics to quantify complexity across software versions, demonstrating that AspectJ implementations are less complex and more maintainable than Java versions.

Contribution

It proposes an evaluation model with metrics and a tool to automatically measure complexity in Aspect Oriented Software Design across versions.

Findings

AspectJ implementations show lower complexity than Java implementations.

Metrics effectively capture complexity symptoms in software design.

Automated tool facilitates comparison of software complexity across versions.

Abstract

Software metric plays a vital role in quantitative assessment of any specific software development methodology and its impact on the maintenance of software. It can also be used to indicate the degree of interdependence among the components by providing valuable feedback about quality attributes such as maintainability, modifiability and understandability. The effort for software maintenance normally has a high correlation with the complexity of its design. Aspect Oriented Software Design is an emerging methodology that provides powerful new techniques to improve the modularity of software from its design. In this paper, evaluation model to capture the symptoms of complexity has been defined consisting of metrics, artifacts and elements of complexity. A tool to automatically capture these metrics across different versions of a case study application, University Automation System has been developed. The values obtained for the proposed metrics are used to infer on the complexity of Java and AspectJ implementations of the case study application. These measurements indicate that AspectJ implementations are less complex compared to the Java implementations and there by positively influencing the maintainability of software.