A Cohesion Measure for C in the Context of an AOP Paradigm

Abstract

Cohesion measures the relative functional strength of a module and impacts the internal attribute of a function such as modularity. Modularity has become an accepted approach in every engineering discipline. The concept of modular design has considerably reduced the complexity of software design. It represents the strength of bond between the internal elements of the modules. To achieve effective modularity, design concepts like functional independence are considered to be very important. Aspect-oriented software development (AOSD) has emerged over the last decade as a paradigm for separation of concerns, which aims to increase the modularity. Therefore the presence of aspects affects the cohesiveness of a module. Like any new technology, aspect-oriented programming (AOP) was introduced to solve problems related to object-orientation (OO), and more in particular Java .It was noticed that AOP’s ideas were not necessarily tied to OO (and Java) but also to less modular paradigm like imperative programming. Moreover, several metrics have been proposed to assess aspect-oriented systems quality attributes in an object oriented context. However, not much work has been done to assess the impact of AOP on imperative style of programming (also called procedural paradigm, such as C language). Therefore, metrics are required to measure quality attributes for AOP used with imperative programming. Cohesion is considered an important software quality attribute. In this context, this paper presents an approach for measuring cohesion based on dependence analysis using control flow graphs (CFG).