This site is intended as a compagnon guide to the master thesis of Jean-Yves Guyomarc'h. You can download the PDF version of the thesis.
You will find in this site:
The limitations of object-oriented programming forced software engineers to seek a real "separation of concerns", which would allow a better modularity and reutilisability of the source code. This was made possible by the creation of the aspect-oriented programming. It aims to encapsulate the concerns, which are incompatible with the objects business logic, in an abstraction called aspect. The aspects are able to introduce the code necessary to these concerns by using their own mechanisms (pointcuts, advices and inter-type introductions).
The creation of a new paradigm implies its study in terms of quality. For aspect-oriented programming, it is also necessary to consider its impact on object-oriented programs. We propose to quantify this impact using class metrics. The computation of these metrics is modified to reflect the repercussions of the various mechanisms of the aspect-oriented programming. This allows the implementation of an architecture to produce sets of metrics, before and after the introduction of aspects.
With these results, we undertook an experiment using visualization. The conclusions of this experiment proves that software engineers can evaluate aspect-oriented programming's impact in terms of quality and that reengineering object-oriented programs through the use of aspects can improve their quality.