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

Towards a Taxonomy of Aspect-Oriented Programming.

As programs continue to increase in size, it has become increasingly difficult to separate concerns into well localized modules, which leads to code tangling- crosscutting code spread throughout several modules. Thus, Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) offers a solution to creating modules with little or no crosscutting concerns. AOP presents the notion of aspects, and demonstrates how crosscutting concerns can be taken out of modules and placed into a centralized location. In this paper, a taxonomy of aspect-oriented programming, as well as a basic overview and introduction of AOP, will be presented in order to assist future researchers in getting started on additional research on the topic. To form the taxonomy, over four-hundred research articles were organized into fifteen different primary categories coupled with sub-categories, which shows where some of the past research has been focused. In addition, trends of the research were evaluated and paths for future exploration are suggested

Middle-out domain-specific aspect languages and their application in agent-based modelling runtime inspection

Domain-Specific Aspect Languages (DSALs) are a valuable tool for separating cross-cutting concerns, particularly within fields with endemic cross-cutting practices. Agent-Based Modelling (ABM) runtime inspection, which cuts across the core concern of model development, serves as a prime example. Despite their usefulness, DSALs face multiple adoption issues: the literature regarding their development and use is incohesive, coupling to a weave target hinders re-use, and available tooling is immature compared to Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs). We believe these issues can be aided by furthering DSL middle-out techniques for DSALs.We first define the background of what a DSAL is and how they may be used, moving onto how we can use DSL techniques to further DSALs. We develop a middle-out semantic model approach for developing domain-level DSALs with transparent aspect orientation using adaptions of DSL techniques. We have implemented the approach for model-specific DSALs for the in-house framework Animaux, and as middleware-specific DSAL for agent messages in the JADE framework, which can be specialised to models using extension DSALs. We give illustrative result cases using our implementations to provide a base of the user development costs and performance of this approach.In conclusion, we believe the adoption of these technologies aids ABM applications and encourage future work in similar fields. This thesis has given a base philosophy toward DSLs, a novel approach for the development of middle-out DSALs and illustrative cases of this approach

Whitepaper: The Value of Improving the Separation of Concerns

Microsoft's enterprise customers are demanding better ways to modularize their software systems. They look to the Java community, where these needs are being met with language enhancements, improved developer tools and middleware, and better runtime support. We present a business case for why Microsoft should give priority to supporting better modularization techniques, also known as advanced separation of concerns (ASOC), for the .NET platform, and we provide a roadmap for how to do so

Microservice Transition and its Granularity Problem: A Systematic Mapping Study

Microservices have gained wide recognition and acceptance in software industries as an emerging architectural style for autonomic, scalable, and more reliable computing. The transition to microservices has been highly motivated by the need for better alignment of technical design decisions with improving value potentials of architectures. Despite microservices' popularity, research still lacks disciplined understanding of transition and consensus on the principles and activities underlying "micro-ing" architectures. In this paper, we report on a systematic mapping study that consolidates various views, approaches and activities that commonly assist in the transition to microservices. The study aims to provide a better understanding of the transition; it also contributes a working definition of the transition and technical activities underlying it. We term the transition and technical activities leading to microservice architectures as microservitization. We then shed light on a fundamental problem of microservitization: microservice granularity and reasoning about its adaptation as first-class entities. This study reviews state-of-the-art and -practice related to reasoning about microservice granularity; it reviews modelling approaches, aspects considered, guidelines and processes used to reason about microservice granularity. This study identifies opportunities for future research and development related to reasoning about microservice granularity.Comment: 36 pages including references, 6 figures, and 3 table

WeaFQAs: A Software Product Line Approach for Customizing and Weaving Efficient Functional Quality Attributes

Fecha de Lectura de Tesis: 10 de julio de 2018Los atributos de calidad funcionales (FQA) son aquellos que tienen una clara implicación en la funcionalidad del sistema, es decir, existen unos componentes específicos que deben ser incorporados a la arquitectura software del sistema para satisfacer sus requisitos de atributos de calidad. Ejemplos de FQAs son seguridad, usabilidad, o persistencia. Modelar estos atributos es una tarea compleja. Por un lado, se componen de muchas características relacionadas, por ejemplo seguridad está compuesto, entre otros, por autenticación, confidencialidad y encriptación. Tienen dependencias entre ellos, por ejemplo, seguridad puede ser requerido por usabilidad o persistencia. Por otro lado, tienen muchos puntos de variabilidad: una aplicación concreta puede requerir autenticación y control de acceso mientras que otra puede necesitar sólo encriptación. Además, su funcionalidad suele estar dispersa afectando a varios componentes del sistema en desarrollo. El objetivo de esta tesis es definir una línea de productos software orientada a aspectos que permita: (1) modelar las similitudes y la variabilidad de los FQAs desde las primeras etapas del proceso de desarrollo, (2) gestionar las dependencias existentes entre los FQAs, (3) independizar el modelado de los FQAs de la arquitectura de la aplicación afectada, (4) configurar los FQAs en base a los requisitos de cada aplicación teniendo además en cuenta propiedades no funcionales como el rendimiento y el consumo energético de cada solución, (5) incorporar las configuraciones a la arquitectura de la aplicación de manera automática; y (6) gestionar la evolución de los FQAs cuando los requisitos cambien en el futuro. Como resultado se ha definido WeaFQAs, un proceso software para gestionar los FQAs que cubre todos los puntos mencionados. Se han realizado y comparado dos instanciaciones de WeaFQAs usando diferentes lenguajes de variabilidad y de modelado, además de proporcionar soporte con una herramienta basada en el lenguaje CVL

A Taxonomy Of Aspect-Oriented Security

Aspect-Oriented Programming is gaining prominence,  particularly in the area of security. There are however no taxonomies available, that classify the proliferation of research done in the area of Aspect-Oriented Security. This paper attempts to categorize research outputs conducted in this area, and evaluate the usability of the aspect-oriented paradigm in terms of software security