Enabling the adoption of aspects - testing aspects

Abstract

Aspect oriented programming (AOP) has started to achieve industry adoption for custom programs and some adoption in frameworks such as the Spring framework. Aspect oriented programming provides many benefits -- it can increase the scope of concerns that can be captured cleanly, it has explicit language support, and the separation provided by AOP provides an elegant mechanism for custom solutions.In this paper we present a model for AOP testing. This includes a model for risk assessment, an associated fault model and AOP testing patterns. We also propose further opportunities for research in the area for automated AOP risk assessment and testing.At ApTSi™ (Applied Technology Solutions, Inc.) we have been applying AOP in the creation of our SOASense™ framework, and in our consulting engagements. We are seeing adoption typically in classical AOP areas such as Logging, Error Handling, Audit events, etc. In these scenarios, having a reliable AOP implementation is critical. For example, having an Audit event not occur for a service call due to a faulty join-point definition can have severe legal implications. We need a solution that provides reliability, is repeatable and enables us to assess risk.