Aspect-Oriented Software Development and Software Process

Abstract

Aspect orientation is an increasingly promising approach to software development. It affords benefits deriving from advanced separation of concerns, including concern modeling, encapsulation, extraction, and composition. These may enable the development and evolution of software on a higher semantic level, with unprecedented control and flexibility. Aspect orientation may hold similar benefits for software process. Aspect orientation has implications for process on three levels: aspect-oriented products, aspect-oriented processes, and aspect-oriented process languages. It also facilitates insight into how the software-process spectrum may be unified. Macroprocess and microprocess concerns do not overlap, but some relationship between them is necessary. The relating of macroprocess concerns and microprocess concerns is the concern of a mesoprocess level, the principal home for process engineering, the purpose of which is to realize the ends of the macro level in terms of the means provided by the micro level. Aspect orientation should also benefit to a rigorous, orderly, and effective discipline of process engineering.