The Role of Aspects in Software Product Lines

Software product lines (SPLs) based development aims at saving development cost as well as reducing time-to-market by structured reuse of base assets for a group of similar products. Requirements of product line are organized into features in FOA (Feature-Oriented Analysis) approach. Commonalities and variabilities among products in a product line are showed in the features. The effectiveness of a SPL approach depends on how well feature variability is implemented and managed. Because there is crosscutting among the features, it is difficult to implement these features into architectural components. In recent years some papers introduce aspect-oriented techniques into SPL to modularize the variable features. In this paper we describe the role of aspects in software product lines from 3 phases, showing their ability for encapsulating variable features into architectural components, and demonstrating how software product lines benefit from adopting aspect-oriented software development concepts.