Architectural Aspects Position Paper Submitted to the Aosd2002 Workshop on Early Aspects: Aspect-oriented Requirements Engineering and Architecture Design

We make a case for the relevance of the ideas of aspect-oriented programming at the architectural level. Traditional approaches to software architecture often assume that a software system exhibits a single architecture, of which the elements map more or less directly to implementation-level components. We claim that multiple architectural views, that may crosscut the implementation structure , can provide a better insight in the overall structure, organization and functionality of a software system than one single architecture which is often strongly biased towards the implementation structure of the system. The elements in such a crosscutting architectural view can be regarded as a kind of architectural aspects that describe how the element crosscuts the implementation structure.