A Metrics Suite to Evaluate the Impact of AOSD on Layered Software Architectures

Software structuring techniques aim to make systems easier to develop and maintain, increasing their quality. Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD) and Software Architectural Styles are examples of such techniques. In spite of all the benefits of such structuring techniques, it is not always easy or even advantageous to integrate two or more of these techniques. For example, the effects of combining AOSD and Layered Software Architectures are still not well understood. This paper proposes a metrics suite to assess the impact of AOSD on layered software architectures. To better account for the influence of aspects on the layered system, we defined new metrics and extended existing ones to measure coupling between system layers and layering violations. These metrics are an initial effort to measure the maintainability of aspectoriented software adopting the layered architectural style. In addition, they can be used to support decision making on combining aspects and layered software architectures. We also developed a tool to automatically collect the proposed metrics.