Comparison of a Visual and a Textual Notation to Express Data Constraints in Aspect-Oriented Join Point Selections: A Controlled Experiment

Many language constructs have been brought forth by research in aspect-oriented software development which permit a succinct and abstract specification of join point selections (aka pointcuts). These language constructs are believed to improve the comprehensibility of the point cuts in comparison to their manually implemented counterparts. The case of comprehensibility gets undecided, though, if two notations permit to specify join point selection constraints in a likewise succinct and abstract manner. This paper reports on a controlled experiment which compares two notations to specify point cuts, i.e. Trace matches and Join Point Designation Diagrams, with respect to their ability to facilitate the comprehension of data constraints in join point selections. Two comprehension tasks are investigated on a basis of 28 point cuts in a three-factorial within-subject design with 35 participants. The experiment results show that JPDDs improve over Trace matches in most cases.

I. Introduction

Aspect-oriented software development [1] is a young software development approach which aims to encapsulate so-called crosscutting concerns [2]. Crosscutting concerns cannot be properly encapsulated into their own implementation modules using conventional software development techniques (such as object-orientation), and consequently pervade the entire code base of a program.