Bad-Smell Metrics for Aspect-Oriented Software

Abstract

Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) is a new programming paradigm that improves separation of concerns by decomposing the crosscutting concerns in aspect modules. Bad smells are metaphors to describe software patterns that are generally associated with bad design and bad programming of object-oriented programming (OOP). New notions and different ways of thinking for developing aspect-oriented (AO) software inevitably introduce bad smells which are specific bad design and bad programming in AO software called AO bad smells. Software metrics have been used to measure software artifact for a better understanding of its attributes and to assess its quality. Bad-smell metrics should be used as indicators for determining whether a particular fraction of AO code contains bad smells or not. Therefore, this paper proposes definition of metrics corresponding to the characteristic of each AO bad smell as a means to detecting them. The proposed bad-smell metrics are validated and the results show that the proposed bad- smell metrics can preliminarily indicate bad smells hidden in AO software.