APTE: Automated pointcut testing for AspectJ programs

Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) has been proposed as a methodology that provides new modularization of software systems by allowing encapsulation of cross-cutting concerns. AspectJ, an aspect-oriented programming language, provides two major constructs: advice and pointcuts. The scope of pointcuts spans across various objects instantiated from the classes. With the increase in the number of objects, classes, and integration of source code, it is likely that a developer writes a pointcut that does not serve its intended purpose. Therefore, there is a need to test pointcuts for validating the correctness of their expressions. In this paper, we propose APTE, an automated framework that tests pointcuts in AspectJ programs with the help of AJTE, an existing unit-testing framework without weaving. Our new APTE framework identifies joinpoints that satisfy a pointcut expression and a set of boundary joinpoints, which are events that do not satisfy a pointcut expression but are close to the matched joinpoints. The boundary joinpoints are identified as those unmatched joinpoint candidates whose distance from the matched joinpoints are less than a predefined threshold value. A developer could inspect these matched joinpoints and boundary joinpoints for correctness of the pointcuts.