An AOP-Based Approach for Collecting Software Maintainability Dynamic Metrics

Software quality is gaining more attention from the software industry. Quality metrics are usually utilized to provide a quantitative measure of the software quality. Although dynamic metrics can provide a clearer insight into the software quality issue, it is observed that usually static metrics are used for such a purpose. This is due mainly to the technical difficulties associated with the collection of dynamic metrics. One of the known issues when dealing with dynamic metrics is the need to instrument code by inserting points for data collection. This is a very tedious and counterproductive task. Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) is a promising technology that is used in the present time to add cross-cutting concerns to the software applications. AOP can be used to transparently instrument the code at compile-time. This research is suggesting AOP as a new technique that can be used for collecting software maintainability dynamic metrics data. Therefore, an AOP-based framework for collecting dynamic metrics has been designed and implemented, and finally, it has been evaluated. The evaluation results showed that the framework is a reasonable approach for collecting a maintainability dynamic metrics. The AOP-based framework provides an effective way for the transparent collection of a maintainability dynamic metrics data.