A Connector-Centric Approach to Aspect-Oriented Software Evolution

Lose sight of the existence of system crosscutting concerns, e.g. safety and quality etc, often causes the system hard to maintain and evolve according to the changing environment and requirements. In this paper we propose an incremental aspect-oriented (AO) approach to ease this kind of evolution problem in architecture level. In this approach we introduce a novel connector, namely aspect weaving connector (AWC), to support the seamless integration of AOSD and software architecture modeling. Concretely crosscutting concerns are encapsulated into aspects and modeled as software components. AWC acts as a connector wrapper coordinating the interaction between aspectual and regular components. In order to provide a formal basic to AWC, we propose a conceptual model of it, which formalizes the underlying mechanisms of aspect dynamic weaving in architecture level using process algebra CSP. Then we verify the model´s properties with FDR2 and prove that our connector-centric AO architecture modeling approach can give system an architectural dynamism and make it easier to maintain and evolve.