Choosing the Right Time to Compose Aspectual Scenarios

Aspect-oriented software development (AOSD) provides effective modularization and composition mechanisms and can be applied at any stage of the software lifecycle. Aspect composition is a crucial feature of AOSD since it allows a developer to get an overall understanding of a system and better analyze the impact of a concern to a set of other concerns. The effort involved in composition, however, may vary depending on the lifecycle stage at which it is applied. This paper compares two methods of composing aspects during the early stages of the lifecycle. In both cases, scenarios and aspectual scenarios are developed for concerns and aspects, respectively. In the first method, the aspectual scenarios are composed immediately. In the second one, they are composed only after the scenarios have been converted to individual object behavioral descriptions. A comparison of the composition effort involved is made based on results of a case study