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Design patterns as aspects: A quantitative assessment

Journal of the Brazilian Computer Society volume 10, pages 49–63 (2004)Cite this article

Abstract

Design patterns offer flexible solutions to common problems in software development. Recent studies have shown that several design patterns involve crosscutting concerns. Unfortunately, object-oriented (OO) abstractions are often not able to modularize those crosscutting concerns, which in turn decrease the system reusability and maintainability. Hence, it is important verifying whether aspect-oriented approaches support improved modularization of crosscutting concerns relative to design patterns. Ideally, quantitative studies should be performed to compare object-oriented and aspect-oriented implementations of classical patterns with respect to important software engineering attributes, such as coupling and cohesion. This paper presents a quantitative study that compares aspect-based and OO solutions for a representative set of design patterns. We have used stringent software engineering attributes as the assessment criteria. We have found that most aspect-oriented solutions improve separation of pattern-related concerns, although some aspect-oriented implementations of specific patterns resulted in higher coupling and more lines of code.

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Affiliations

  1. Software Engineering Laboratory Computer Science Department, PUC-Rio, Braizl

    Cláudio Sant’Anna, Alessandro Garcia, Uirá Kulesza, Carlos Lucena & Arndt von Staa

Authors
  1. Cláudio Sant’Anna
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  2. Alessandro Garcia
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  3. Uirá Kulesza
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  4. Carlos Lucena
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  5. Arndt von Staa
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Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Sant’Anna, C., Garcia, A., Kulesza, U. et al. Design patterns as aspects: A quantitative assessment. J Braz Comp Soc 10, 49–63 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03192358

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Keywords

  • Design patterns
  • aspect-oriented programming
  • metrics