A Taxonomy of Aspects in Terms of Crosscutting Concerns

Aspect-orientation provides support for “ Separation of Concerns” by means of techniques that first isolate and then weave concerns. Most work in aspect-orientation has achieved such goals at the programming level, even also at the modeling level. Though, in some cases the application of these techniques is independent of the problem itself. In other words, the techniques for weaving either code or models are in principle applicable to a number of problems without a clear criterion to answer questions like: in what software processes we may actually discuss aspect-orientation? This also brings other questions: what do we consider an aspect?, how do we deal with it?, are aspects crosscutting concerns? The first notions of aspect-orientation relate to crosscutting in code. We consider this a bottom-up approach. We believe though, that aspect-orientation can be better understood from an architectural perspective. We call this a top-down approach. We explore the question of “what makes an aspect an aspect” and “when do aspects arise” from a top-down perspective. Our work relates to a definition of aspects in terms of requirements traceability, proposes a classification, and altogether a taxonomy.