Aspect-Oriented Change Realizations and Their Interaction

With aspect-oriented programming, changes can be treated explicitly and directly at the programming language level. An approach to aspect-oriented change realization based on a two-level change type model is presented in this paper. In this approach, aspect-oriented change realizations are mainly based on aspect-oriented design patterns or themselves constitute pattern-like forms in connection to which domain independent change types can be identified. However, it is more convenient to plan changes in a domain specific manner. Domain specific change types can be seen as subtypes of generally applicable change types. These relationships can be maintained in a form of a catalog. Some changes can actually affect existing aspect-oriented change realizations, which can be solved by adapting the existing change implementation or by implementing an aspect-oriented change realization of the existing change without having to modify its source code. As demonstrated partially by the approach evaluation, the problem of change interaction may be avoided to a large extent by using appropriate aspect-oriented development tools, but for a large number of changes, dependencies between them have to be tracked. Constructing partial feature models in which changes are represented by variable features is sufficient to discover indirect change dependencies that may lead to change interaction.