Evolution Issues in Aspect-Oriented Programming

This chapter identifies evolution-related issues and challenges in aspectoriented programming. It can serve as a guideline for adopters of aspect technology to get a better idea of the evolution issues they may confront sooner or later, of the risks involved, and of the state-of-the-art in the techniques currently available to help them in addressing these issues. We focus in particular on the programming level, although some of the issues and challenges addressed may apply to earlier software development life-cycle phases as well. The discussed issues range from the exploration of crosscutting concerns in legacy code, via the migration of this code to an aspect-oriented solution, to the maintenance and evolution of the final aspectoriented program over time. We discuss state-of-the-art techniques which address the issues of aspect exploration, extraction and evolution, and point out several issues for which no adequate solutions exist yet. We conclude that, even though some promising techniques are currently being investigated, due to the relative immaturity of the research domain many of the techniques are not out of the lab as yet.