Aspect Browser: Tool Support for Managing Dispersed Aspects

Abstract

Introduction Over time, requirements for a software system evolve to meet changing user needs or compete in the marketplace. Consequently, software maintenance and evolution are the dominant activities in the software lifecycle. Designing for change---a major tenet of software design---has been cast as a problem of designing software so that it can be extended, replaced in small pieces, or locally changed, rather than globally changed [5, 6]. Locality of change through information hiding is pursued because global changes are hard to reason about and can require the coordination of all the developers who have expertise with the software involved. Although modularization, if used properly, separates the concerns of primary design decisions, it often fails to cost-effectively separate lower-order design decisions [8]. These lower-order decisions may cross-cut the primary module structure for at least two reasons. One, the programming language used provides behavioral abstraction