Impact of Aspect Oriented Programming on Software Maintainability - A Descriptive Study

Software maintenance is a term of major interest and it is a valuable part of software development cycle. One of the main aspects of software quality in software products is maintainability. Further, there are four sub categories of maintainability: analyzability, changeability, stability, and testability. Maintainability plays a vital role in improving software quality as software changes/updates are frequently required in this process. Object oriented programming has contributed in improving software maintainability, but crosscutting concerns affects the maintainability of object oriented software. In these days, Aspect oriented programming (AOP) is rising as a new methodology which provides more modularization of crosscutting concerns that help the programmers to reuse the code. This paper presents the various software maintainability metrics for an AOP and also discusses the various case studies which were conducted to assess the maintainability of software.