Benchmarking Stability of Aspect-Oriented Product-Line Decompositions

Product-line stability is essential to promote the longevity of its core assets and products. Even though modularity is a key principle to achieve stable product lines, many of their varying concerns are crosscutting. Aspectoriented decompositions are aimed at fostering superior modularity of such crosscutting concerns. However, their ability to improve stability of product lines has been rarely tested and, as a consequence, their industrial adoption has been hindered. This paper presents a stability benchmark for aspect-oriented product lines. It allows characterizing, quantifying, and comparing product-line stability promoted by aspect-oriented and conventional variability mechanisms. The benchmark consists of an exemplar’s assets, from where instabilities can be concretely observed from requirements to source code. The usefulness of the benchmark has been assessed through a family of empirical studies. KeywordsBenchmarks, Software Product Lines, Stability, Empirical Evaluation, Aspect-Oriented Software Development.