Workshop on the Maintenance of Aspect Oriented Systems

Motivations and Goals The Aspect Oriented (AO) Programming paradigm is spreading out more and more when developing software systems. Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) allows to easily and better modularize and manage the crosscutting concerns by means of program units called “aspects" [Kic97]. The code related to crosscutting concerns, encapsulated in aspects, is “woven" into the code of the traditional program units (e.g. classes in OO code) to build the overall system. While there are several approaches to reengineer and evolve ‘traditional’ systems towards AO ones, there is still very few about the maintenance of AO systems. The maintenance of an AO system may be more difficult than a traditional one. This is mainly because the system resulting after weaving presents relationships among aspects and traditional modules that can hevily modify the structure and behaviour of the basic system (i.e. the system with no weaving ). Thus, due to the heavy and intrusive impact that AOP constructs have on the code they belong, it could be very difficult to evaluate the impact that a change has on the whole system as well as it could be very difficult to evaluate any side/ripple effect in the system the change could introduce. The maintenance of AO systems will be one of next challenges of software engineering. The software engineers should be provided with adequate methods, techniques and tools to successfully face and overcome the new problems and difficulties that AOP constructs introduce for maintenance tasks. Some main questions rise at this aim: • are the to-day methods/techniques/tools to maintain ‘traditional’ software systems (e.g. Object Oriented systems) adequate to maintain AOP systems too? • which and in which way the AOP constructs can make hard maintenance task? • how the today maintenance approaches can be adapted to allow them to take into account the new characteristics of AOP? • do we need to identify “best practices” for AOP paradigm that help to design and implement more maintainable software systems? Just as an example, traditional code representation models usually used to support the maintenance tasks might not be adequate to fully support the analysis of AO systems to fully comprehend them, due to the specific features characterizing AOP and the effect they have on the code they belong. Thus, new approaches, or the adaptation of the existing ones, taking into account the specific features of AOP have to be defined and used to effectively identify maintenance problems and to perform maintenance tasks of AO system. Based on these issues, the proposed workshop has the main aim of: • making more aware the software maintenance community of the (new) difficulties related to AO system maintenance; • presenting and discussing proposals about the problems raising in the maintenance of AO systems, and ways to effectively address these issues; • acting as a forum for the promotion of joint research and experimental studies about the maintenance of AO systems.