An Interprocedural Aspect Control Flow Graph to Support the Maintenance of Aspect Oriented Systems

Aspect oriented programming (AOP) supports the cross-cutting of concerns by means of aspects. The maintenance of AO systems may be more difficult than 'traditional' ones, due to the large impact that aspects have on the static structure and dynamic behavior of the overall system. In this paper an inter-procedural aspect control flow graph is proposed to represent the interactions among the aspects and the object oriented (OO) components of an AO system. The graph allows an easier identification of the impact between aspects and the OO components. It helps the maintainer to identify sources of undesired side and ripple effects in the code and avoid the introduction of new ones when modifying an AOP system.