Software systems are increasingly being built as compositions of reusable artifacts (components, frameworks, toolkits, plug-ins, APIs, etc) that have non-trivial usage constraints in the form of interface contracts, underlying assumptions and design composition rules. Satisfying these constraints is challenging: they are often not well documented; or they are difficult to integrate into the software development process in ways that allow their identification by developers; or they may not be enforced by existing tools and development environments. Aspect-Oriented Programming has been advocated as an approach to represent and enforce software constraints in code artifacts. Aspects can be used to detect constraint violations, or more pro-actively, to ensure that the constraints are satisfied without requiring the developer's attention. This paper discusses our experience using aspects to document and enforce software constraints in an industrial application, specifically TDE/UML, a model-driven software testing tool developed at SIEMENS. We present an analysis of common constraints found in our case study, a set of primitive aspects developed to help the enforcement of software constraints, and show how AOP has been incorporated into existing software development and governance approaches in the TDE/UML project. We conclude with a discussion of strengths and limitations of AspectJ in supporting these constraints.
Filho et al. REF propose using aspects to document and validate software regularities in an industrial MDE application.
Experiences documenting and preserving software constraints using aspects
AOSD '11
Computer Science