A concern-oriented framework for dynamic measurements

Evolving software programs requires that software developers reason quantitatively about the modularity impact of several concerns, which are often scattered over the system. To this respect, concern-oriented software analysis is rising to a dominant position in software development. Hence, measurement techniques play a fundamental role in assessing the concern modularity of a software system. Unfortunately, existing measurements are still fundamentally module-oriented rather than concern-oriented. Moreover, the few available concern-oriented metrics are defined in a non-systematic and shared way and mainly focus on static properties of a concern, even if many properties can only be accurately quantified at run-time. Hence, novel concern-oriented measurements and, in particular, shared and systematic ways to define them are still welcome. This paper poses the basis for a unified framework for concern-driven measurement. The framework provides a basic terminology and criteria for defining novel concern metrics. To evaluate the framework feasibility and effectiveness, we have shown how it can be used to adapt some classic metrics to quantify concerns and in particular to instantiate new dynamic concern metrics from their static counterparts.