Modularity is a fundamental technique used for the composition of large software systems. Under modularity, design decisions that are likely to change are encapsulated within individual modules. However, programmers also employ crosscutting concepts, such as design patterns and programming idioms, which cannot be effectively modularized. Consequently, implementations of these crosscutting concepts can be expensive to change, even when the code is well-structured. In this dissertation, I describe an extension to the refactoring paradigm that provides for the modular maintenance of crosscutting concepts, supporting both substitutability of implementations and the checking of essential constraints. This extension was realized through the Arcum framework, a plug-in for Eclipse that allows programmers to describe the use of their crosscutting programming concepts with a declarative language. I present the conceptual underpinnings of the Arcum approach, and show how Arcum can be used to address several classical software engineering problems. I also present evidence from a user study of three pairs of programmers showing that Arcum can be easy to learn and use.

At their most essential, aspect languages, program analysis tools, and refactoring tools attempt to give programmers mechanisms to make it more cost effective to manage the crosscutting behavior in their programs. Arcum is a tool to help manage crosscutting that lets programmers define custom program checks and program transformations, using a declarative language. In this paper we present a study aimed at investigating how programmers use Arcum for managing the complexity of crosscutting. In particular, we recorded and transcribed three pairs of programmers performing a variety of tasks using Arcum. By informally analyzing the language in the transcript, we identify the metaphors that the participants used to think about crosscutting design idioms, and the development styles that they used to build solutions. Based on these observations, we reflect on how the use of Arcum relates to traditional programming and AOP approaches, and propose improvements to be made to the development environment to help programmers handle the challenges of crosscutting code. A key observation was that the programmers actively and ingeniously sought ways to force the tool to give early feedback, suggesting that AOP tools like Arcum could do more to support early feedback.

Pre-2018 CSE ID: CS2008-0933