On Identifying Bug Patterns in Aspect-Oriented Programs

Bug patterns are erroneous code idioms or bad coding practices that have been proved fail time and time again. They mainly arise from the misunderstanding of language features, the use of erroneous design patterns or simple mistakes sharing the common behaviors. Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) is a new technique to separate the cross-cutting concerns for improving modularity in software design and implementation. However, there is no effective debugging technique for aspect-oriented programs until now and none of the prior researches focused on the identification of bug patterns in aspect-oriented programs. In this paper, we present six bug patterns in AspectJprogramming language and show the corresponding example for each bug pattern to help to illustrate the symptoms of these patterns. We take this as the first step to provide an underlying basis on testing and debugging of AspectJ programs.