Contributing Factors to Pointcut Fragility

Authors

Phil Greenwood, Relative Insight
Awais Rashid, University of Bristol
Raffi T. Khatchadourian, CUNY Hunter CollegeFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

10-2009

Abstract

Pointcut fragility is a well-documented problem of Aspect-Oriented Programming with changes to the base-code causing join points to incorrectly fall in or out of scope. In order to combat this problem a tool was developed that provides mechanical assistance to pointcut maintenance. This tool relied on the deep structural commonalities between program elements to detect when pointcut fragility occurs. During the assessment of this tool a number of common practices were uncovered that were employed both in the aspect and base-code that contributed to or prevented pointcut fragility. This paper documents the practices uncovered and describes how they can affect pointcut fragility and design stability in general.

Comments

Phil Greenwood, Awais Rashid, and Raffi Khatchadourian. Contributing factors to pointcut fragility. In Workshop on Assessment of Contemporary Modularization Techniques, ACoM ’09, pages 19–24. ACM, October 2009.