Sustainable System Infrastructure and Big Bang Evolution: Can Aspects Keep Pace?

Realistically, many rapidly evolving systems eventually require extensive restructuring in order to effectively support further evolution. Not surprisingly, these overhauls reverberate throughout the system. Though several studies have shown the benefits of aspect-oriented programming (AOP) from the point of view of the modularization and evolution of crosscutting concerns, the question remains as to how well aspects fare when the code that is crosscut undergoes extensive restructuring. That is, when evolution is a big bang, can aspects keep pace? The case study presented here considers several categories of aspects – design invariants, dynamic analysis tools, and domain specific design patterns – and shows the concrete ways in which aspects had positive, negative and neutral impact during the restructuring of the memory management subsystem of a virtual machine. Compared with best efforts in a hierarchical decomposition coupled with a preprocessor, aspects fared better than the original implementation in two out of four aspects, and no worse in the remaining two aspects.