Investigating the effect of aspect-oriented refactoring on software maintainability

Abstract

Refactoring improves software quality by improving the design of existing code through changing its internal structure while preserving its behavior. A number of refactorings were proposed specifically for Aspect-Oriented (AO) systems. AO techniques are emerging to cope with the challenges of current software development and to address shortcomings of existing paradigms. Each of the proposed aspect-oriented refactorings (AOR) has a particular purpose and effect, thus their effect on software quality attribute may vary. The software maintenance activities cost lots of time and effort to be performed. In this paper, we propose a classification of AOR based on their measurable effect on software maintainability. The aim of the classification is to help the software designer and developer decide which AOR can be applied to optimize AO system with respect to maintainability. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.