A Systematic Review on Aspects in Software Architecture Design

Originally, the introduction of aspects to address crosscutting concerns was proposed for implementation activities. Aspects have also been considered in the software architecture community in order to solve the problems of modularization of crosscutting concerns. The real benefits of introducing aspects into software architecture design are still debated. In this article, a systematic review on aspect-oriented software architectures is proposed. The chosen articles were evaluated based on criteria such as which non-functional requirements were improved and which architecture views were considered in each study. In addition, specific qualities related to software maintenance, such as understandability and modifiability, were evaluated for each article. The purposes are to evaluate what are the most common concerns considered when designing a software architecture using aspects, and whether the introduction of aspects is useful in software maintenance.