Section: New Results

Testing aspect oriented programs

Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) promises better software quality through enhanced modularity.

Crosscutting concerns are encapsulated in separate units called aspects and are introduced at specific points in the base program at compile-time or runtime. However, aspect-oriented mechanisms also introduce new risks for reliability that must be tackled by specific testing techniques in order to fully benefit from the use of AOP. During the evaluation period, we proposed a series of work to analyze these new risks, let designers understand the interactions between the base and the aspects and test aspects. The major achievement is a novel oracle to test the injection of aspects in a base program. The oracle allows to capture new classes of errors that occur only in aspect-oriented programs. Its ability to capture these errors in a more efficient way than an object-oriented oracle (shorter test cases and written in less time), has been empirically demonstrated and was published in the Journal for Software Testing, Verification and Reliability [74] .