A Systematic Review on Performance Evaluation of Aspect-Oriented Programming Techniques used to Implement Crosscutting Concerns

Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) was proposed with the main objective of addressing an important software quality principle that is modularization. The basic idea of the paradigm is to capture crosscutting concerns as a programming abstraction called aspect. Since the introduction of aspects as a complement to objectoriented programming, many evaluations and empirical studies were provided to the new paradigm, including the application of a variety of software metrics in order to provide evidence of the benefits or problems with the new paradigm. There is no consensus about the impact on performance of the use of AOP techniques to deal with crosscutting concerns. The use of AOP to implement crosscutting concerns and its impact on performance is the motivation for this study. This paper explores further the evaluation of performance by proposing a systematic literature review with the purpose of finding out how performance is affected by the introduction of aspects. The result of this systematic review is that there has been few studies on scientific literature concerning AOP and performance and most of these studies are too specific, and sometimes even inconclusive. This article presents these miscellaneous results and how they were extracted from the literature.