A Coupling Framework for AspectJ

Aspect-oriented programming and in particular AspectJ as its predominant implementation has received an increasing amount of attention by the measurement community. Lately, new measures have been suggested that focus on aspect-oriented core concepts, including several measures for coupling in aspectoriented systems. However, these measures use different terminologies and lack a clear design goal which makes an analysis, comparison and validation a difficult task. Also, the lack of a sound foundation for coupling measures complicates the definition of new measures for specific measurement goals. These problems are addressed in this paper by the adaptation of an existing framework for coupling measurement in object-oriented systems for AspectJ to create a basis on which further research into aspect-oriented coupling measures can be carried out. First, an overview of related work is given, followed by an introduction to the AspectJ programming language and its core concepts. The adapted framework will be presented and applied in order to specify a new aspect-oriented measure.