Summary

Software architecture design prescribes the structure of software systems and is generally considered as a key artefact to cope with the large, complex and evolving software systems. To identify the relevant architectural components from the corresponding stakeholder requirements various software architecture design methods have been introduced. These approaches, however, do not explicitly consider the management of concerns, or aspects, which cannot be easily captured in local modular units and as such crosscut multiple components. Industrial practices and academic research have shown that this lack of expression techniques for identifying and managing these crosscutting concerns, directly results in increased complexity and reduced maintenance of the software systems.

Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD) is an emerging technology that provides explicit abstractions and mechanisms to model crosscutting concerns. Existing aspect-oriented software development approaches have basically focused on identifying the aspects at the programming level and less attention has been taken on the impact of crosscutting concerns at the architecture design level.

Based on our experience in both software architecture design and aspect-oriented software development this project aims to enhance architecture design methods, by introducing new techniques that can identify, represent and compose aspects at the architecture design level. The enhanced method will be validated using experimentations within the context of IBM Global Services. We think that the problems that are addressed are generic and the techniques that will be defined will be beneficial for the larger industrial and academic software projects.

The AOSAD project is funded by the Dutch Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).