Driving and managing architectural decisions with aspects

Abstract

Software architects face decisions every day which have a broadly-scoped impact on the software architecture. These decisions are the core of the architecting process as they typically have implications in a multitude of architectural elements and views. Without an explicit representation and management of those crucial choices, architects cannot properly communicate and reason about them and their crosscutting effects. The result is a number of architectural breakdowns, such as decreased evolvability, time-consuming trade-off analysis, and unmanageable traceability. Aspects are a natural way to capture widely-scoped architectural decisions and promote software architectures with superior modularity.