Overcoming comprehension barriers in the AspectJ programming language

It has now been over a decade since the introduction of Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP). As the AspectJ programming language (being one of the notable technologies of AOP) gains acceptance in industry and academia, its comprehensibility property is an important factor in determining an eventual wide acceptance by practitioners in development and maintenance as well as by educators who aim at introducing AOP into their curricula. Our objective is to improve program comprehension by identifying and addressing potential pitfalls in code which tend to make comprehension not intuitive. In those subtle places, we observe the behavior of the program to see the degree to which it matches the expected results. In cases where a conflict occurs, we provide a reasoning to point out where it would originate from, and a resolution to the conflict where applicable.