Towards Assessing Modularity

It's noted in this workshop's call for papers that despite the emergence of a large number of "modularisation techniques" (e.g., aspects, design patterns, and so on), there are no standard approaches or "rules of thumb" for assessing the benefits and drawbacks of using these techniques in the construction of real software systems. In this paper we argue that the first step in assessing such techniques should be to determine their effect on modularity. Only then can we be sure that they have even been correctly classified as "modularisation techniques".