Andrea Schauerhuber, Wieland Schwinger, Elisabeth Kapsammer, Werner Retschitzegger, Manuel Wimmer, Gerti Kappel
Abstract. Aspect-orientation provides a new way of modularization
by clearly separating crosscutting concerns from non-crosscutting ones.
While aspect-orientation originally has emerged at the programming
level, it now stretches also over other development phases. There are, for
example, already several proposals to Aspect-Oriented Modeling (AOM),
most of them pursuing distinguished goals, providing different concepts
as well as notations, and showing various levels of maturity. Consequently,
there is an urgent need for both, academia and practice, to
provide an in-depth survey, clearly identifying commonalities and differences
between current AOM approaches. Existing surveys in this area
focus more on comprehensibility with respect to development phases
or evaluated approaches rather than on comparability at a fine-grained
level.
This paper tries to fill this gap. As a prerequisite for an in-depth evaluation,
a conceptual reference model is presented, capturing the basic
concepts of AOM and there interrelationships in terms of a UML class
diagram. Based on this conceptual reference model, an evaluation framework
has been designed by deriving a detailed and well-defined catalogue
of evaluation criteria. The actual evaluation by means of this criteria catalogue
and by employing a running example is done on the basis of a
carefully selected set of eight AOM approaches, each of them having already
reached a certain level of maturity. This per approach evaluation is
complemented with an extensive report on lessons learned, summarizing
the approaches’ strengths and shortcomings.
Technical Report, October 2007