A quantitative assessment of aspect design notations with respect to reusability and maintainability of models

Aspect-oriented design notations improve the reusability and maintainability of models by means of separating crosscutting concerns from the core functionality of the system. However, as different design notations propose dissimilar ways of modeling and composing the crosscutting and core concerns, the capabilities of aspect design notations with regards to producing highly reusable and maintainable models may also vary. In this paper, we apply a selected set of aspect modeling notations to a modeling scenario and evaluate them with respect to reusability and maintainability of the obtained models. For this purpose, we have used different metrics related to well-known software engineering attributes that affect the reusability and maintainability of produced design. The results reveal that the Reusable Aspect Models performs well against majority of the employed metrics.