(A) scenario modeling approach for identification and resolution of aspect conflicts

Abstract

Aspect orientation is an approach to modularize crosscutting concerns of software. Many researches on aspect orientation have been mainly focused on the implementation level. Therefore, it is necessary to extend the AOP concept to the overall lifecycle of software development. Aspect-oriented software development is recent effort of considering crosscutting concerns throughout the software lifecycle, which is called AOSD. Identifying and resolving conflicts between aspects in composing multiple aspects in software design time is one of the important issues in AOSD. Several approaches such as Petri Net, Statechart, and Activity diagram based approaches have been suggested to compose aspect models, and identify and resolve the conflicts between aspects. However, they could not identify various aspectual conflicts such as dependency, mutual exclusion, and precedence. This thesis proposes a set of scenario-based rules to identify and resolve a common set of conflicts that may occur among aspects in AOSD. The scenario rules are composed of Rule1: scenario modeling rule for aspects, Rule2: composition rule for single aspect, and Rule3: composition rule for conflicting aspects. Also, this thesis proposes Aspect Conflict Matrix, and Aspect Conflict Resolution Chart. They support to identify and resolve the conflicts between aspects and compose the base and aspectual scenarios. This scenario modeling approach has been applied to a case study, Automatic Teller Machine system which has various aspects. Also this scenario modeling approach has been compared with related works. This shows that this scenario modeling approach is effective to identify and resolve the conflicts between aspects such dependency, mutual exclusion, and precedence. The composed scenarios without aspect conflicts help developers to understand an overall system and analyze the impact of a crosscutting concern to other concerns. As aspect conflicts are identified and resolved, and aspect scenarios are...