On the Separation of Concerns in Program Families

Abstract

Aspect-orientation can help to separate concerns in software. One of the goals of this separation is to promote flexibility and configurability; this is especially true when constructing program families (and product-lines). This paper introduces a set of principles that instruct in the creation of flexible, configurable, aspect-oriented systems. We illustrate the principles through their application to a software product-line. The principle of dependency alignment serves as a guideline for structuring concern implementation in modules, eliminating unwarranted dependencies between concerns. The principles of orthogonal and weakly orthogonal aspects instruct in the design of aspects that are included in some system configurations, but not in others. We show how these principles scale to larger systems and larger concern implementations.