SEKE 2012 Proceedings - Knowledge Systems Institute

5 Final Remarks and Further Works
Most software artifacts are abstract, having no physical
representation. Focusing on source code, obtaining insights
can be difficult, especially because of the amount of lines
in software systems and its structure. Our motivation came
from analyzing the associated AOP source code, since the
new AOP features and consequences – fragmented, tangled
and spread code – must be externalized by a visual mapping.
There are some tools that provide visual representations.
Some of them support Aspect-Oriented programs,
some have the necessity of manually mapping concerns, and
some provide no aspect identification. But most of them do
not provide a more broad aid to entire program understanding.
So, a coordinated visual mapping was proposed to
present Aspect-Oriented programs’ features using three visual
presentations and a content list which aim to externalize
structural organization, the relations among classes
and aspects, and the advised code. The proposed coordination
schema makes it possible to highlight selected elements
on different detail levels, allowing the user to gather information
about aspect and its spreading to the source code
–howaspects crosscut the program structures, composing
program behavior.
We also developed a tool (SoftV iz OAH ) to assess the
visual coordination model proposed. And both Object Oriented
and AOP source code has been used on assessing the
coordinated visual mapping. Also, SoftV iz OAH is able
to show test cases’ results along with the visual representations,
that allows analyzing how the test cases go through
source code and their coverage. Hitherto, our evaluation has
shown that such feature is helpful in locating defects (where
the defect is).
Also according to preliminary evaluation, the tool’s
functionalities are useful to support Aspect-Oriented program
understanding. However, to assess the effectiveness
and efficiency of the visual proposed mapping in a more realistic
manner, a controlled experiment has been planned,
and will be conducted using an experimentation process,
aimed to locate defects previously inserted into AOP source
codes.
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