Towards an Empirical Validation of Aspect-Oriented Coupling Measures

In this paper we report on ongoing research into the empirical validation of aspect-oriented coupling measures as indicators of maintainability of aspectoriented software. We investigated the aspects of a medium-scale software package developed in industry and measured the maintenance effort that was spent on this software as the number of changed lines throughout the history of each aspect. This measure of maintenance effort was correlated with size and several of the coupling metrics. Our results seem to suggest that some coupling measures indeed can be considered as possible indicators of maintainability. However, our data also suggests that size is a better indicator of maintenance effort than any other metric we studied.