Comparing Aspect-Oriented and Component-Based design: A Quantitative Study

Although Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD) has been a topic of research for more than ten years, there is still little empirical proof of its actual benefits. In particular, few empirical studies have been conducted to illustrate the value of aspect orientation in the earlier phases of the software life-cycle. To move towards filling this gap in the current state-of-the-art, we focus on the empirical validation of aspect orientation during the design phases of software development. This paper describes an experiment we conducted to quantify the maintainability of aspect-oriented design. In this experiment an aspect-oriented and a componentbased design approach were adopted by two strictly separated teams, starting from the same set of requirements for a real-world digital publishing system. By applying wellestablished metrics on these designs we attempt to evaluate how they differ with respect to maintainability.