Comparing maintainability evolution of object-oriented and aspect-oriented software product lines

Software Product Line aims at improving productivity and decrease realization times by gathering the analysis, design and implementation activities of a family of systems. Evaluating the quality attributes for SPL architectures is very crucial especially architecture maintainability as SPL are expected to have longer lifetime span. Aspect-orientation offers a modularization way by separating crosscutting concerns from non-crosscutting ones. Aspect-oriented programming is assumed to endorse better modularity and changeability of product lines than traditional variability mechanisms. In this paper, we show that change propagation probability (CP) is helpful and effective in assessing the design quality of software architectures. We propose to use the CP to assess the evolution of the architecture of software product lines through different releases. We use CP to investigate whether aspect oriented SPL has better maintainability evolution than object-oriented SPL.