Validation of Context-Dependent Aspect-Oriented Adaptations to Components

All potential component non-functional properties needed by third parties for late composition can not be anticipated beforehand, as they tend to be context-dependent. Moreover, those quality properties tend to be hard to modularize and can hardly be factored out of components. Developers therefore tend to embed non-functional properties within domain-specific frameworks and components. We aim to take advantage of the expressive power of Aspect-Oriented Programming to modularize those concerns, so that both frameworks and components can be refined to satisfy specific requirements at deployment time, composition time as well as at runtime. We claim that the key to the integration of Aspect-Oriented Software Development to Component-Based Software Engineering lies in the ability to derive and validate the specification of a component that has been subject to aspect weaving. By explicitly specifying the desired properties of components and aspects, we aim to increase the capability to reason about aspect weaving, so that the correctness of a refined component can be verified with respect to a specification.