UML Extensions for Aspect Oriented Software Development.

Abstract

AOSD (Aspect Oriented Software Development) is an emerging discipline in Software Engineering. It focuses on the separation of concerns of the ’70s, aiming at improving modularity, to ensure maintainability in the sense of extensibility, changeability and reuse, towards an evolutionary software product responding to a more dynamic environment. The AOP (Aspect Oriented Programming) paradigm of the ’90s focuses on the separation of the crosscutting concerns, which are in general non functional requirements (quality requirements). It is now of general agreement that the entanglement and scattering of concerns must be handled early in the software life cycle. However, these aspects are inherent to all the stages of software development, from requirements elicitation to code implementation. Many concepts and mechanisms have been proposed to handle properly these issues; however terms are in general semantically slightly dierent in each discipline where they have been formulated and used, causing misunderstanding and confusion. This paper presents an AOSD UML core for early aspects (requirements, analysis and design disciplines), constructed gathering dierent modelling elements found in the literature, focusing particularly on the AOSD ontolgy document of the Common Foundation for AOSD of the European Community, and dierent