This workshop is intended to bring together researchers interested in pushing the frontier in this important area, and practitioners who have experienced problems related to inadequate separation of concerns that can help to guide the research. One kind of concern may promote some goals and activities, while impeding others. This reduces comprehensibility and increases impact of change and the likelihood of error. Since every criterion for decomposition has corresponding benefits and disadvantages, any criterion for decomposition will be appropriate for some contexts, goals, and purposes, but not for all. Further, multiple kinds of concerns may be relevant simultaneously, and they may overlap and interact, as features and classes do.
Many concerns span lifecycle phases and artifacts.
Finally, the set of concerns and modularizations needed will tend to evolve throughout the lifecycle, as new requirements, technologies, developers, methodologies, and practices emerge. As decomposition becomes more sophisticated, correspondingly sophisticated composition mechanisms are needed. The need to support this evolving plethora of interacting concerns across the software lifecycle poses serious challenges to advanced separation of concerns mechanisms. None comes close to doing the whole job, yet, and work pertaining to any subarea is within the scope of this workshop. This is a partial list of relevant workshops and selected papers on advanced separation of concerns, listed chronologically.