Modularity Analysis of Use Case Implementations

Component-based decomposition can result in implementations with use cases code tangled and scattered across components. Modularity techniques such as aspects, mixins, and virtual classes have been recently proposed to address this problem. One can use such techniques to group together code related to a single use case. This paper analyzes qualitatively and quantitatively the impact of this kind of use case modularization. We apply one specific technique, Aspect Oriented Programming, to modularize the use case implementations of the Health Watcher system. We extract traditional and contemporary metrics, including cohesion, coupling and separation of concerns and analyze modularity in terms of quality attributes such as changeability, support for parallel development, and pluggability. Our findings indicate that the results of modularity analysis depends on other factors beyond the chosen system, metrics and the applied technique.