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

AOSD Ontology 1.0 - Public Ontology of Aspect-Orientation

This report presents a Common Foundation for Aspect-Oriented Software Development. A Common Foundation is required to enable effective communication and to enable integration of activities within the Network of Excellence. This Common Foundation is realized by developing an ontology, i.e. the shared meaning of terms and concepts in the domain of AOSD. In the first part of this report, we describe the definitions of an initial set of common AOSD terms. There is general agreement on these definitions. In the second part, we describe the Common Foundation task in detail

Towards an aspect weaving BPEL engine

This position paper proposes the use of dynamic aspects and the visitor design pattern to obtain a highly configurable and extensible BPEL engine. Using these two techniques, the core of this infrastructural software can be customised to meet new requirements and add features such as debugging, execution monitoring, or changing to another Web Service selection policy. Additionally, it can easily be extended to cope with customer-specific BPEL extensions. We propose the use of dynamic aspects not only on the engine itself but also on the workflow in order to tackle the problems of Web Service hot deployment and hot fixes to long running processes. In this way, composing aWeb Service "on-the-fly" means weaving its choreography interface into the workflow

A Framework for Evaluating Model-Driven Self-adaptive Software Systems

In the last few years, Model Driven Development (MDD), Component-based Software Development (CBSD), and context-oriented software have become interesting alternatives for the design and construction of self-adaptive software systems. In general, the ultimate goal of these technologies is to be able to reduce development costs and effort, while improving the modularity, flexibility, adaptability, and reliability of software systems. An analysis of these technologies shows them all to include the principle of the separation of concerns, and their further integration is a key factor to obtaining high-quality and self-adaptable software systems. Each technology identifies different concerns and deals with them separately in order to specify the design of the self-adaptive applications, and, at the same time, support software with adaptability and context-awareness. This research studies the development methodologies that employ the principles of model-driven development in building self-adaptive software systems. To this aim, this article proposes an evaluation framework for analysing and evaluating the features of model-driven approaches and their ability to support software with self-adaptability and dependability in highly dynamic contextual environment. Such evaluation framework can facilitate the software developers on selecting a development methodology that suits their software requirements and reduces the development effort of building self-adaptive software systems. This study highlights the major drawbacks of the propped model-driven approaches in the related works, and emphasise on considering the volatile aspects of self-adaptive software in the analysis, design and implementation phases of the development methodologies. In addition, we argue that the development methodologies should leave the selection of modelling languages and modelling tools to the software developers.Comment: model-driven architecture, COP, AOP, component composition, self-adaptive application, context oriented software developmen

A multiple view interactive environment to support MATLAB and GNU/Octave program comprehension

Program comprehension plays an important role in Software Engineering. In fact, many of the software lifecycle activities depend on program comprehension. Despite the importance of MATLAB and Octave programing languages in the Engineering and Statistical communities, little attention has been paid to the conception, implementation and characterization of tools and techniques for the comprehension of programs written in these languages. Considering this scenario, this paper presents a Multiple View Interactive Environment (MVIE) called OctMiner that supports the comprehension of programs developed in the aforementioned languages. OctMiner provides a set of coordinated visual metaphors that can be adjusted in accordance with the comprehension goals. An example is presented to illustrate the main functionalities of OctMiner in a real scenario of program comprehension.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Service-oriented coordination platform for technology-enhanced learning

It is currently difficult to coordinate learning processes, not only because multiple stakeholders are involved (such as students, teachers, administrative staff, technical staff), but also because these processes are driven by sophisticated rules (such as rules on how to provide learning material, rules on how to assess students’ progress, rules on how to share educational responsibilities). This is one of the reasons for the slow progress in technology-enhanced learning. Consequently, there is a clear demand for technological facilitation of the coordination of learning processes. In this work, we suggest some solution directions that are based on SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture). In particular, we propose a coordination service pattern consistent with SOA and based on requirements that follow from an analysis of both learning processes and potentially useful support technologies. We present the service pattern considering both functional and non-functional issues, and we address policy enforcement as well. Finally, we complement our proposed architecture-level solution directions with an example. The example illustrates our ideas and is also used to identify: (i) a short list of educational IT services; (ii) related non-functional concerns; they will be considered in future work

A concern visualization approach for improving MATLAB and octave program comprehension

The literature has pointed out the need for focusing efforts to better support comprehension of MATLAB and Octave programs. Despite being largely used in the industry and academia in the engineering domain, programs and routines written in those languages still require efforts to propose approaches and tools for its understanding. Considering the use of crosscutting concerns (CCCs) to support the comprehension of object-oriented programs, there is room of its use in the context of MATLAB and Octave programs. The literature has purpose and examples in this direction. Considering this scenario, we propose the use of visualization enriched with CCCs representation to support the comprehension of such programs. This paper discusses the use of a multiple view interactive environment called OctMiner in the context of two case studies to characterize how collected information relating to crosscutting concerns can foster the comprehension of MATLAB and GNU/Octave programs. As a result of the conducted case studies, we propose strategies based on OctMiner and tailored to support different comprehension activities of programs written in MATLAB and Octave.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio