The Impact of Coupling on the Fault-Proneness of Aspect-Oriented Programs: An Empirical Study

—Coupling in software applications is often used as an indicator of external quality attributes such as fault-proneness. In fact, the correlation of coupling metrics and faults in objectoriented programs has been widely studied. However, there is very limited knowledge about which coupling properties in aspect-oriented programming (AOP) are effective indicators of faults in modules. Existing coupling metrics do not take into account the specificities of AOP mechanisms. As a result, these metrics are unlikely to provide optimal predictions of pivotal quality attributes such as fault-proneness. This impacts further by restraining the assessments of AOP empirical studies. To address these issues, this paper presents an empirical study to evaluate the impact of coupling sourced from AOP-specific mechanisms. We utilise a novel set of coupling metrics to predict fault occurrences in aspect-oriented programs. We also compare these new metrics against previously proposed metrics for AOP. M...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: ISSRE
• Authors: Rachel Burrows, Fabiano Cutigi Ferrari, Otávio Augusto Lazzarini Lemos, Alessandro Garcia, François Taiani
• Keywords: Coupling, Coupling Metrics, Faults, ISSRE 2010, Software Engineering