Aspects in Architectural Description of Evolving Systems

Software architecture is the most important artifact in the software life cycle. The architectural description and the architectural design decide the quality and the longevity of the software. The design decisions made to arrive at a particular software architecture decide the value of quality attributes such as performance, reliability, security and modifiability. Also the percentage of design reuse is decided by the design heuristics like modularity and abstraction which are supported by metrics like cohesion and coupling. Aspects are cross-cutting concerns across components. Though concept of aspect-orientation had come up initially for the concerns cross-cutting the code, the concept is very much required to be addressed from the design stage itself. As the metrics for cohesion and coupling get affected due to these cross-cutting concerns, the scenario results in lower values for modifiability and reuse quality attributes. IEEE 1471-2000 is the standard for “Recommended practice for architectural description of software-intensive systems”. The standard uses the conceptual framework and its components like views, viewpoints and models. It does talk about concerns such as performance, reliability, security, distribution, and evolvability, but fails to accommodate the description for cross-cutting concerns. In this paper we focus on the importance of aspects in architectural description of evolving systems.