Abstract:Traditional approaches tangle the error handling concerns with the primary functional code, which inevitably increase the degree of coupling and decreases the understandability and the maintainability of programs. This paper presents an empirical study of a real-world Satellite Orbit Forecasting system by refactoring error handling policies as methods of classes and aspects, respectively. A set of experiments are constructed to evaluate the original version with the two refactored versions. Based on the results of experiments from the refactoring process, it can be concluded that the modularity and maintainability of the program have been improved without a noticeable compromise in performance by encapsulating computational error handling polices as aspects.