From scenarios to aspects

Abstract

Software product lines are gaining importance because they allow improvements in time to market, cost, productivity and quality of software products. Architecture evaluation is one important aspect in the development of product lines for large-scale distributed systems. It is desirable to evaluate and compare architectures for functionality and quality attributes before implementing or changing the whole system. Often, the effort required for the thorough evaluation of alternatives using prototypes is prohibitive. In this paper, we present an approach for cost-efficient software architecture evaluation, based on scenario-oriented software specifications, modeling the system services. We show how to map the same set of services to several possible target architectures and give a procedure to generate evaluation prototypes using aspect-oriented programming techniques. This significantly reduces the effort required to explore architectural alternatives. We explain our approach using the Center TRACON Automation System as an example.