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 scope management of non-functional requirements in requirements engineering

Getting business stakeholders’ goals formulated clearly and project scope defined realistically increases the chance of success for any application development process. As a consequence, stakeholders at early project stages acquire as much as possible knowledge about the requirements, their risk estimates and their prioritization. Current industrial practice suggests that in most software projects this scope assessment is performed on the user’s functional requirements (FRs), while the non-functional requirements (NFRs) remain, by and large, ignored. However, the increasing software complexity and competition in the software industry has highlighted the need to consider NFRs as an integral part of software modeling and development. This paper contributes towards harmonizing the need to build the functional behavior of a system with the need to model the associated NFRs while maintaining a scope management for NFRs. The paper presents a systematic and precisely defined model towards an early integration of NFRs within the requirements engineering (RE). Early experiences with the model indicate its ability to facilitate the process of acquiring the knowledge on the priority and risk of NFRs

Improving the Design and Implementation of Software Systems uses Aspect Oriented Programming

A design pattern is used as a static reusable component of object oriented design in the many patterns catalogue. The regular design pattern does not show any collaboration of shared resource between patterns in the software design. But generative design pattern is a new design pattern that shows the relationship and shared resources between them. The generative design pattern is considered a dynamic and active design, which creating new design as a result of collaboration and resource usage between two designs. This paper will demonstrate benefit and the structure of generative pattern. It also demonstrates the creation of a desktop application for modeling generative design pattern. The Java language creates the desktop application. The application provides many features, for instance, users can place drawing objects such as class, Interface and Abstract Class object. The users also can draw different connection line between these objects, such as simple, inheritance, composition lines. This project shows the implementation details techniques of drawing objects and their connection. It also provides an open source code that many novice developers can understand and analysis for further development. The application source code gives the developers new ideas and skills in object oriented programming and graphical user interface in Java language

Integrating the theme approach with aspectual scenarios

Dissertação de Mestrado em Engenharia InformáticaAspect-oriented requirements engineering emerged to deal with crosscutting requirements, i.e. requirements that are scattered in the requirements document and tangled with other requirements. There are several aspect-oriented requirements approaches - Theme, proposed by Baniassad and Clarke [7], is one of them. This approach is characterized by the identification of a set of actions associated to verbs present in requirements documentation. These actions are then analyzed in order to identify crosscutting behaviours, each one constituting a potential theme. One problem with this approach is that the composition mechanism is not expressive enough even when the Theme models are integrated to analysis models (e.g. UML diagrams). The MATA approach [24] provides powerful composition mechanisms, based on graph transformations that used UML models, in particular behaviour models (e.g. sequence or activity like diagrams). These models express scenarios that constitute a very popular and used technique to specify a system’s behaviour. Therefore, the result of the integration of these two approaches will be synergetic. Also, considering that in a system not only the expected situations happen, scenarios can also be used to illustrate unexpected situations, making their treatment possible. Negative scenarios are thus also considered, besides the positive ones: their representation is similar, only differing from an optimist and mostly assumed vision of the system’s behavior. These scenarios could be identified with Theme and mapped into MATA. In summary, the objective of this dissertation is twofold: firstly, we will integrate Theme with Aspectual Scenarios (specified in MATA); secondly, we will extend Theme to include the modeling of negative scenarios. The result will be the synergy between two complementary techniques, including the specification of undesirable situations, where behavioral and structural aspect modeling are integrated

An Aspect-Oriented Approach for Spatial Concerns in Web Applications

The growing availability of on-line geographical information, since the advent of open map servers in the 2000s, originated a new generation of Web applications, those which combine “conventional” Web functionality with typical features of traditional Geographic Application System (GIS). The rapid growth in number and complexity of Web applications with geo-referenced data together with the need to support fast requirements change, demands for increased modularity. The volatility of some of these changing requirements, both in the scope of their geographic nature or in the period of time in which they are valid, stresses the importance of the applications’ modularity. A solution is to take into consideration the crosscutting nature of these requirements and decouple their realization from “conventional” requirements in separate software modules. This paper proposes an end-to-end Aspect-Oriented approach to deal with spatial requirements from the early stages of applications development throughout to implementation. A significant contribution of this approach is the characterization of the most common spatial requirements in Web-GIS applications. The result is the improvement of the overall application’s modularity, thus facilitating its evolution.Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzad

Tracing the distribution concern: Bridging the Gap

Distribution is often presented as an example of a crosscutting concern that is difficult to modularize. This paper presents an approach for modeling distribution using a combination of AOSD and use cases. One of the aims of the paper is to bridge the gap between the handling of crosscutting concerns during the early and later phases of the lifecycle when developing distributed applications. With our approach the distribution concern is modularized in control objects in Analysis, in design control classes in Design and in distributed components in Implementation and Deployment. Use cases are used to establish a clear traceability among the analysis, design, deployment and implementation stages. In this sense, control objects of the analysis have a direct correspondence with distributed components in the implementation and deployment models

Aspect-based approach to modeling access control policies, An

Department Head: L. Darrell Whitley.2007 Spring.Includes bibliographical references (pages 119-126).Access control policies determine how sensitive information and computing resources are to be protected. Enforcing these policies in a system design typically results in access control features that crosscut the dominant structure of the design (that is, features that are spread across and intertwined with other features in the design). The spreading and intertwining of access control features make it difficult to understand, analyze, and change them and thus complicate the task of ensuring that an evolving design continues to enforce access control policies. Researchers have advocated the use of aspect-oriented modeling (AOM) techniques for addressing the problem of evolving crosscutting features. This dissertation proposes an approach to modeling and analyzing crosscutting access control features. The approach utilizes AOM techniques to isolate crosscutting access control features as patterns described by aspect models. Incorporating an access control feature into a design involves embedding instantiated forms of the access control pattern into the design model. When composing instantiated access control patterns with a design model, one needs to ensure that the resulting composed model enforces access control policies. The approach includes a technique to verify that specified policies are enforced in the composed model. The approach is illustrated using two well-known access control models: the Role- Based Access Control (RBAC) model and the Bell-LaPadula (BLP) model. Features that enforce RBAC and BLP models are described by aspect models. We show how the aspect models can be composed to create a new hybrid access control aspect model. We also show how one can verify that composition of a base (primary) design model and an aspect model that enforces specified policies produces a composed model in which the policies are still enforced