Identifying semantic differences in AspectJ programs

Martin Th Görg, Jianjun Zhao

Abstract: Program differencing is a common means of software debugging. Although many differencing algorithms have been proposed for procedural and object-oriented languages like C and Java, there is no differencing algorithm for aspect-oriented languages so far. In this paper we propose an approach for difference analysis of aspect-oriented programs. The proposed algorithm contains a novel way of matching two versions of a module of which the signature has been modified. For this, we also work out a set of well defined signatures for the new elements in the AspectJ language. In accordance with these signatures, and with those existent for elements of the Java language, we investigate a set of signature patterns to be used with the module matching algorithm. Furthermore, we demonstrate successful application of a node-by-node comparison algorithm originally developed for object-oriented programs. Using a tool which implements our algorithms, we set up and evaluate a set of test cases. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for a large subset of the AspectJ language.