Khatchadourian, Raffi and Rashid, Awais and Masuhara, Hidehiko and Watanabe, Takuya (2015) Detecting broken pointcuts using structural commonality and degree of interest. In: 30th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2015) November 9–13, 2015 Lincoln, Nebraska, USA :. IEEE, pp. 641-646. ISBN 9781509000241
Abstract
Pointcut fragility is a well-documented problem in Aspect-Oriented Programming; changes to the base-code can lead to join points incorrectly falling in or out of the scope of pointcuts. Deciding which pointcuts have broken due to base-code changes is a daunting venture, especially in large and complex systems. We present an automated approach that recommends pointcuts that are likely to require modification due to a particular basecode change, as well as ones that do not. Our hypothesis is that join points selected by a pointcut exhibit common structural characteristics. Patterns describing such commonality are used to recommend pointcuts that have potentially broken to the developer. The approach is implemented as an extension to the popular Mylyn Eclipse IDE plug-in, which maintains focused contexts of entities relevant to the task at hand using a Degree of Interest (DOI) model.