An exploratory case study of aspect‐oriented metrics for fault proneness, content and fixing effort prediction

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationships between some aspect‐oriented metrics and aspect fault proneness, content and fixing effort.Design/methodology/approach – An exploratory case study was conducted using an open source aspect‐oriented software consisting of 76 aspects, and 13 aspect‐oriented metrics were investigated that measure different structural properties of an aspect: size, coupling, cohesion, and inheritance. In addition, different prediction models for aspect fault proneness, content and fixing effort were built using different combinations of metrics' categories.Findings – The results obtained from this study indicate statistically significant correlation between most of the size metrics and aspect fault proneness, content and fixing effort. The cohesion metric was also found to be significantly correlated with the same. Moreover, it was observed that the best accuracy in aspect fault proneness, content and fixing effort prediction can be achieved as a function...