Back to the future: A retroactive study of aspect evolution in operating system code (2003)
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BibTeX
@INPROCEEDINGS{Coady03backto,
author = {Yvonne Coady},
title = {Back to the future: A retroactive study of aspect evolution in operating system code},
booktitle = {},
year = {2003},
pages = {50--59},
publisher = {ACM Press}
}
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Abstract
The FreeBSD operating system more than doubled in size between version 2 and version 4. Many changes to primary modularity are easy to spot at a high-leveL For example, new device drivers account for 38 % of the growth. Not surprisingly, changes to crosscutting concerns are more difficult to track. In order to better understand how an aspect-oriented implementation would have fared during this evolution, we introduced several aspects to version 2 code, and then rolled them forward into their subsequent incarnations in versions 3 and 4 respectively. This paper describes the impact evolution had on these concerns, and provides a comparative analysis of the changes required to evolve the tangled versus aspect-oriented implementations. Our results show that for the concerns we chose, the aspect-oriented implementation facilitated evolution in four key ways: (1) changes were better localized, (2) configurability was more explicit, (3) redundancy was reduced, and (4) extensibility aligned with an aspect was more modular. Additionally, we found that the aspect-oriented implementation had negligible impact on performance. 1.
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