Hammock-based Identification of Changes in Advice Applications between Aspect-oriented Programs

In an aspect-oriented program, the cross-cutting functionalities are defined in pieces of advice such that they apply to program-execution points for the core functionalities. Program changes can affect the application of pieces of advice. To that end, a source-code differencing tool, for two versions of an aspect-oriented program, needs to support the identification of changes in pieces of advice at locations of their applications. To alleviate this task, we introduce an extension of the existing differencing technique for object-oriented programs. We implemented a tool AjDiff and used it to evaluate our technique on the two examples of aspect-oriented programs: Tracing and Telecom. We manually verified that our tool can successfully identify changes in pieces of advice at locations of their application.