Impact of aspect-oriented programming on software development efficiency and design quality: an empirical study

The aspect-oriented programming approach is supposed to enhance a system’s features, such as its modularity, readability and simplicity. Due to a better modularization of crosscutting concerns, the developed system implementation would be less complex, and more readable. Thus software development efficiency would increase, so the system would be created faster than its object-oriented equivalent. An empirical study of a web-based manuscript submission and a review system is carried out to examine aspect-oriented vs. object-oriented approach with regard to software development efficiency and design quality. The study reveals that the aspect-oriented programming approach appears to be a fullfledged alternative to the pure object-oriented approach. Nevertheless, the impact of aspect-oriented programming on software development efficiency and design quality was not confirmed. In particular, it appeared that design quality metrics were not significantly associated with using aspect-oriented programming, instead of object-oriented programming. It is possible that the benefits of aspect-oriented programming will exceed the results obtained in this study for experiments with larger number of subjects.