An ADL dealing with aspects at software architecture stage

Managing complex software systems is one of the most important problems to be solved by software engineering. The software engineer needs to apply new techniques that allow for their adequate manipulation. Software architecture is becoming an important part of software design, helping the designer to handle the structure and the complexity of large systems, and AOSD is a paradigm proposed to manage this complexity by considering crosscutting concerns throughout the software’s life-cycle. The suitability of the existence of an Aspect-Oriented (AO) architectural design appears when AO concepts are extended to the whole life-cycle. In order to adequately specify the AO design, aspect-oriented architecture description languages are needed. The formal basis of these will allow architects to reason about the properties of the software architecture. In this paper, a new architecture description language – AspectLEDA – is formally described in order to adequately manipulate AO concepts at the software architecture stage. The AspectLEDA translation process is also described. A toolkit assists the architect during the process. Finally, a prototype of the system can be obtained, and the correctness of the architecture obtained can be checked.