Aspect-Oriented Software Development: the Role of Early Aspects
Aspect-oriented software development (AOSD) aims at addressing crosscutting concerns by providing means for their systematic identification, separation, representation and composition. Crosscutting concerns are encapsulated in separate modules, known as aspects, so that localisation can be promoted. This results in better support for modularisation hence reducing development, maintenance and evolution costs. A number of aspect-oriented programming approaches have been proposed. Work has also been carried out to incorporate aspects, and hence separation of crosscutting concerns, at the design level mainly through extensions to the UML meta-model. Research on the use of aspects at the early phases of the software development is still immature and there is no consensus about what an aspect is at this early stage of software development and how it maps to artefacts at later development stages. The Early Aspects movement begun in 2002, with the organization of the first edition of the “Early Aspects”, in conjunction with the first AOSD conference.<P>
This talk starts with a brief introduction to AOSD, then follows by focusing on the Early Aspects initiative and finishes by presenting ARCADE, a particular aspect-oriented requirements engineering approach.
