Assessing Intra-application Exception Handling Reuse with Aspects

Recent studies have attempted to evaluate the benefits and drawbacks of using aspect-oriented programming to modularize exception handling code. In spite of their many interesting findings, these studies have not reached a consensus when it comes to the impact of aspectization on exception handler reuse. In fact, their results are sometimes in direct contradiction.In this paper we describe a study aiming to answer the question of whether AOP really promotes the implementation of reusable exception handling. We analyze reuse in a specific context: in terms of the number of duplicated or very similar error handlers that can be removed from a program when extracting error handling code to aspects. Our study targets three industrial-strength, medium-size software systems from different domains and employs a comprehensive set of concern-specific metrics.