A Controlled Experiment for the Assessment of Aspects Tracing in an Industrial Context

For years the Aspect Oriented Software Development community has promoted aspects as a solution to complexities introduced by implementing crosscutting concerns. And while a lot of research focuses on advancing the state of the art of aspect oriented programing and design, there is still no (reported) wide-spread industrial adoption of Aspect Oriented Programming. In this paper we report on an experiment to quantify the aspect-based approach to Tracing. The experiment was performed in an industrial setting at ASML. We believe that the example is a stereotypical aspect-oriented problem and as such the results of this experiment are very likely generalizable to other aspects. Participants of the experiment were requested to carry out five simple maintenance scenarios, related to Tracing. The result of this experiment demonstrates 6% and 77% reduction in development effort and errors, respectively. The statistical significance analysis has confirmed these reductions for a subset of the individual scenarios.