Addressing aspect interactions in an industrial setting: experiences, problems and solutions

Aspect oriented programming (AOP) introduces new and powerful modularization constructs. The aspect module is used to encapsulate crosscutting concerns, which otherwise would remain tangled and scattered. The idea of encapsulating crosscutting concerns rapidly expanded to earlier phases in the development cycle, including requirement analysis (aspect oriented requirement engineering, AORE) and design (aspect oriented modeling, AOM). The overall application of aspect orientation concepts is known as aspect oriented software development (AOSD). AOP is not yet a mainstream practice. Particularly AOSD is still in its early stages. This is reflected in the lack of reports of full development cycles using aspect oriented approaches, especially using industrial case studies. Furthermore, the power of aspects comes at the price of new challenges, one of them is that systems built using aspects are more difficult to understand. The crosscutting nature of aspects allows them to alter the behavior of many other modules. As a result, aspects may interact in unintended and unanticipated ways. This problem is known as aspect interactions. In this work we deal with the aspect interaction problem in the context of an industrial domain: slots machines. We perform a complete development cycle of the slot machine software. This is, to the best of our knowledge, the first complete industrial case of study of aspect orientation. Through this experience we discovered the limitations with regard to aspect interactions, of some emblematic aspect oriented approaches for requirement engineering, design and implementation. The contribution of this work is threefold. Firstly, we contribute with the evaluation and extensions to some of AORE and AOM approaches, in order to provide explicit support for aspect interactions in requirement analysis and design phases. We also evaluate the implementation of interactions using a static and a dynamic AOP language, and propose an AspectJ extension that copes with aspect interactions. Secondly, this work is the first report of a complete aspect oriented development cycle of an industrial case study. Thirdly, this work provides a complex case study that presents several business logic crosscutting concerns, which in turn exhibit numerous aspect interactions, that serves as a challenging test bed for upcoming AOSD approaches.Facultad de Informátic

Composition of Aspectual Requirements: A Multi-criteria Process for Conflict Resolution.

In Aspect Oriented Software Development, aspects are not only used at the programming level but also tend to arise at the requirements analysis and software architecture design. We previously proposed an approach named AspeCiS (An aspect-oriented Approach to Develop a Cooperative Information System) to develop a Cooperative Information System from existing Information Systems by using their artifacts such as existing requirements and design elements. This approach include an important step in which the aspectual requirements composition problem is considered to be one of the remaining challenges. So, when multiple aspectual requirements share the same join point, undesired behavior may emerge and a conflict resolution process must be triggered. This study presents a conflict resolution process among aspects during the requirements engineering level: A priority value is computed for each aspect and it allows identifying a dominant aspectual requirement on the basis of stakeholder priority. This process is more formal than those currently proposed, which requires a trade-off negotiation to resolve conflicts

SOSE4BD: Service-oriented software engineering framework for big data applications

© 2019 by SCITEPRESS - Science and Technology Publications, Lda. Service computing has emerged to address the notion of delivering software as a service and Service-Oriented Architecture emerged as a design method supporting well defined design principles of loose coupling, interface design, autonomic computing, seamless integration, and publish/subscribe paradigm. Integrated big data applications with IoT, Fog, and Cloud Computing grow exponentially: businesses as well as the speed of the data and its storage. Therefore, it is time to consider systematic and engineering approach to developing and deploying big data services as the data-driven applications and devices increasing rapidly. This paper proposes a software engineering framework and a reference architecture which is SOA based for big data applications' development. This paper also concludes with a simulation of a complex big data Facebook application with real-time streaming using part of the requirements engineering aspect of the SOSE4BD framework with BPMN as a tool for requirement modelling and simulation to study the characteristics before big data service design, development, and deployment. The simulation results demonstrated the efficiency and effectiveness of developing big data applications using the reference architecture framework for big data

Early aspects: aspect-oriented requirements engineering and architecture design

This paper reports on the third Early Aspects: Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering and Architecture Design Workshop, which has been held in Lancaster, UK, on March 21, 2004. The workshop included a presentation session and working sessions in which the particular topics on early aspects were discussed. The primary goal of the workshop was to focus on challenges to defining methodical software development processes for aspects from early on in the software life cycle and explore the potential of proposed methods and techniques to scale up to industrial applications

A taxonomy of asymmetric requirements aspects

The early aspects community has received increasing attention among researchers and practitioners, and has grown a set of meaningful terminology and concepts in recent years, including the notion of requirements aspects. Aspects at the requirements level present stakeholder concerns that crosscut the problem domain, with the potential for a broad impact on questions of scoping, prioritization, and architectural design. Although many existing requirements engineering approaches advocate and advertise an integral support of early aspects analysis, one challenge is that the notion of a requirements aspect is not yet well established to efficaciously serve the community. Instead of defining the term once and for all in a normally arduous and unproductive conceptual unification stage, we present a preliminary taxonomy based on the literature survey to show the different features of an asymmetric requirements aspect. Existing approaches that handle requirements aspects are compared and classified according to the proposed taxonomy. In addition,we study crosscutting security requirements to exemplify the taxonomy's use, substantiate its value, and explore its future directions

A goal-oriented requirements modelling language for enterprise architecture

Methods for enterprise architecture, such as TOGAF, acknowledge the importance of requirements engineering in the development of enterprise architectures. Modelling support is needed to specify, document, communicate and reason about goals and requirements. Current modelling techniques for enterprise architecture focus on the products, services, processes and applications of an enterprise. In addition, techniques may be provided to describe structured requirements lists and use cases. Little support is available however for modelling the underlying motivation of enterprise architectures in terms of stakeholder concerns and the high-level goals that address these concerns. This paper describes a language that supports the modelling of this motivation. The definition of the language is based on existing work on high-level goal and requirements modelling and is aligned with an existing standard for enterprise modelling: the ArchiMate language. Furthermore, the paper illustrates how enterprise architecture can benefit from analysis techniques in the requirements domain

Detecting Functional Requirements Inconsistencies within Multi-teams Projects Framed into a Model-based Web Methodology

One of the most essential processes within the software project life cycle is the REP (Requirements Engineering Process) because it allows specifying the software product requirements. This specification should be as consistent as possible because it allows estimating in a suitable manner the effort required to obtain the final product. REP is complex in itself, but this complexity is greatly increased in big, distributed and heterogeneous projects with multiple analyst teams and high integration between functional modules. This paper presents an approach for the systematic conciliation of functional requirements in big projects dealing with a web model-based approach and how this approach may be implemented in the context of the NDT (Navigational Development Techniques): a web methodology. This paper also describes the empirical evaluation in the CALIPSOneo project by analyzing the improvements obtained with our approach.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2013-46928-C3-3-RMinisterio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2015-71938-RED

Aspect-oriented design model.

Designing crosscutting concerns (aspects) is a challenging task. Since crosscutting concerns were not addressed while developing contemporary software design techniques, so they lack support for accommodating representation of such concerns along with base program. Some design languages like UML have been extended to express aspects and their elements but they do not fully represent aspects. Some lack adequate representation of aspect elements and some lack an efficient and reusable composition technique. In this paper, some of the aspect-oriented design techniques have been critically discussed. A proposed aspect model has been discussed which helps in overcoming the deficiencies in the contemporary aspect-oriented design techniques. This model represents aspects and their elements throughout the software development life cycle

A framework for the simulation of structural software evolution

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2008 ACM.As functionality is added to an aging piece of software, its original design and structure will tend to erode. This can lead to high coupling, low cohesion and other undesirable effects associated with spaghetti architectures. The underlying forces that cause such degradation have been the subject of much research. However, progress in this field is slow, as its complexity makes it difficult to isolate the causal flows leading to these effects. This is further complicated by the difficulty of generating enough empirical data, in sufficient quantity, and attributing such data to specific points in the causal chain. This article describes a framework for simulating the structural evolution of software. A complete simulation model is built by incrementally adding modules to the framework, each of which contributes an individual evolutionary effect. These effects are then combined to form a multifaceted simulation that evolves a fictitious code base in a manner approximating real-world behavior. We describe the underlying principles and structures of our framework from a theoretical and user perspective; a validation of a simple set of evolutionary parameters is then provided and three empirical software studies generated from open-source software (OSS) are used to support claims and generated results. The research illustrates how simulation can be used to investigate a complex and under-researched area of the development cycle. It also shows the value of incorporating certain human traits into a simulation—factors that, in real-world system development, can significantly influence evolutionary structures