Proceedings of the 2 nd workshop on linking aspect technology and evolution

Proceedings of the 2nd workshop on linking aspect technology and evolution CWI's research has a theme-oriented structure and is grouped into four clusters. Listed below are the names of the clusters and in parentheses their acronyms. ABSTRACT Software evolution lies at the heart of the software development process, and suffers from problems such as maintainability, evolvability, understandability, etc. Aspect-oriented software development (AOSD) is an emerging software development paradigm, that tries to achieve better separation of concerns. It is often claimed that this is actually beneficial for the maintainability, evolvability and understandability of the software. This workshop aims to investigate and explore this relationship between software evolution and AOSD. In particular, the workshop's objective is to study the impact of AOSD on software evolution on the one hand, and the impact of software evolution on AOSD on the other hand. Both subjects raise several interesting issues that could/should be addressed and studied in detail during the workshop: how does applying AOSD affect the quality of the application, and how does this help software evolution? can we quantify when applying AOSD solutions is beneficial? how do we recognise crosscutting concerns in existing applications? which techniques (f.e. refactoring, slicing) exist to separate them from the base code? should these techniques be extended with AOSD-specific concepts, and if so, how? how can we ensure the behaviour of the existing application is preserved? what (aspect) language constructs are needed to express the detected concerns? Answers to these questions are important, as there are many applications that continue to miss the advantages of AOSD, because appropriate tools and techniques are not sufficiently mature, and the advantages are not yet entirely clear. The workshop is specifically intended to address these questions, identify other interesting issues and bring together researchers from academia and people from industry working on applying AOSD techniques to already-existing applications.