Abstract

Early aspects crosscutting concerns that exist in the early life cycle phases of software development, including the requirements analysis, domain analysis and architecture design activities. Whereas conventional aspect-oriented software development approaches are mainly concerned with identifying aspects at the programming level (and leave the identification and treatment of aspects to implementers), early aspects work focuses on the impact of crosscutting concerns at the early phases of the software development. Identifying and managing early aspects across phases:

  • increases consistency of requirements and architecture with each other and with implementation;

  • provides a way for people with system-wide responsibility and scope (such as architects and domain experts) to identify aspects;

  • provides methods and techniques for reasoning about and managing the broad influence of aspects;

  • provides rationale and traceability for aspects across lifecycle activities, supporting decision making on aspect mapping;

  • helps ensure that crosscutting concerns evident in a system’s problem domain or solution space are captured as aspects, and are mapped via architecture and design onto the best suited implementation.

This workshop aims to facilitate cross-fertilization of ideas in requirements engineering, domain engineering, software architecture design, and aspect-oriented software development in order to identify the problems and potential solutions and continue the maturation of Early Aspects as a discipline.
This workshop continues the work accomplished at earlier workshops, held in conjunction with AOSD 2002-2006, OOPSLA 2004-2005, SPLC-Europe 2005, as well as ICSE 2006. In fact, the Early Aspects workshops have become AOSD’s de facto forum for discussion of pre-implementation aspects.  Moreover, recent editions of the Early Aspects workshop outside of the AOSD community (OOPSLA, SPLC-Europe, ICSE) have been particularly insightful because of the different perspectives of those respective communities.  The workshop held at ICSE 2006 attracted close to 30 attendees (it was in the top-third of most attended workshops) and provided an opportunity for the views of the larger SE community on Early Aspects to be heard and discussed. We expect this ICSE edition to be equally stimulating.  Like all others, it will build on previous results and contribute to an ongoing knowledge base, as well as provide an opportunity to continue the discussion with the wider SE community that was initiated at ICSE 2006.

 

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