Using AOP to Ease Evolution

This paper describes our experience in using Aspect Oriented Programming to greatly ease maintenance and evolution tasks in industrial software evolution. We have discovered that AOP can be effectively used to add unpluggable features to an existing code base. AOP has allowed us to place code related to certain features into separate modules, which eases evolution when requirements change. Furthermore, AOP allows us to compose these features with the base system in a flexible manner. We relate our positive experience using AOP in production code, describing its use in implementing our project, and detailing the advantages and disadvantages of its use. We abstract our experiences, and report a constrained version of a known AOP design pattern for use in constructing arbitrary, highly composable, independent features.