Expressing aspectual interactions in design: Experiences in the slot machine domain

Abstract

In the context of an industrial project we are implementing the software of a casino slot machine. This software has a significant amount of cross-cutting concerns that depend on, and interact with each other, as well as with the modular concerns. We therefore wish to express our design using an appropriate Aspect-Oriented Modeling methodology and notation. We evaluated two of the most mature methodologies: Theme/UML and WEAVR, to establish their suitability. Remarkably, neither of these allow us to express any of the dependencies and interactions to our satisfaction. In both cases, half of the interaction types cannot be expressed at all while the other half need to be expressed using a work around that hides the intention of the design. As a result, we consider both methodologies and notations unsuitable for expressing the dependencies and interactions present in the slot machine domain. In this paper we describe our evaluation experience. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.