Applying and Evaluating Concern-Sensitive Design Heuristics

Empirical studies have stressed that aspect-oriented decompositions can cause non-obvious flaws in the modularity of certain design concerns. Without proper design evaluation mechanisms, the identification of these flaws can become counter-productive and impractical. Nowadays, modularity assessment is mostly supported by metric-based heuristics rooted at conventional attributes, such as module cohesion and coupling. However, such conventional module-driven assessment cannot be tailored to the design concerns. This paper proposes and systematically evaluates a representative suite of concern-sensitive heuristic rules. The accuracy of the heuristics is assessed through their application to six systems. The analysis was based on the heuristics support for: (i) addressing the shortcomings of conventional metrics-based assessments, (ii) reducing the manifestation of false positives and false negatives, and (iii) finding the presence of design flaws relative to both classes and aspects.