Systematic review on aspect-oriented UML modeling: A complete aspectual UML modeling framework

Abstract

This study presented a systematic review on Aspect-Oriented Modeling by using UML, which is the popular and well-established modeling language in the industry. Further, the Aspect-Orientation is a complement for Object-Orientation. Thus, it would be natural to investigate the adaptability of UML to Aspect-Orientation. Our research questions focused on investigating the Aspect-Oriented UML (AOUML) approaches based on the literature and for having the benefits of a complete framework for AOUML. The objective of this study was to systematically identify and analyze the Aspect-Oriented Modeling approaches using UML. Therefore, a systematic literature review has been carried out on the existing studies published in the conferences, proceedings and journals. Based on the review, it is evident that the complexity and size systems have grown up, which accumulatively led to the manifestation of new concerns. Moreover, these new concerns that have arrived onboard have cut-cross other concerns and core classes in the system by its nature. Due to this fact, the concept of Advance Separation of Concerns (ASoC) has been put on the table of discussions and the need for an approach to model and represent these crosscutting concerns (Aspect), which is responsible for producing, spreading and tangling representation, throughout the development of life cycle, which is vital and this is considered to be our motivation of systematic review of Aspectual UML modeling. As a result, we have searched the proper databases using the suitable keywords, which match our research questions; we have also collected 468 studies and screened them to minimize the number of studies to 73, which are more appropriate for the present study. © 2013 Asian Network for Scientific Information.