Maintainability of Technologies for Programming Software Product Lines: A Comparative Study

• José Natanael Reis UFLA
• Gustavo Vale UFMG
• Heitor Costa UFMG

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/sbqs.2015.15214

Abstract

In Software Product Line (SPL), the aim is a systematic and large-scale reuse. The SPL maintainability should be high, because change in a module can affect various products. Therefore, figuring out which technology/language that has greater maintainability can help software development companies, whose requires constant changes to choose the development technology. The main goal of this study is to assess the maintainability of three equivalent SPLs implemented with Feature-Oriented Programming using AHEAD, Aspect-Oriented Programming using AspectJ and Delta-Oriented Programming using DeltaJ. Six measures are used to evaluate four attributes: size; cohesion; coupling; and, complexity. As result, there is significant differences in the comparison only for one of the six measures, in which the maintainability of the SPLs developed in AspectJ and DeltaJ can be considered the same, but better than AHEAD SPL.

Keywords: Maintainability, Programming, Software Products

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