Separation of Crosscutting Concerns at the Design Level: An Extension to the UML Metamodel

Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) was proposed as a way of improving the separation of concerns at the implementation level by introducing a new kind of modularization unit - an aspect. Aspects allow programmers to implement crosscutting concerns in a modular and well-localized way. As a result, the well-known phenomena of code tangling and scattering are avoided. After a decade of research, AOP has gained acceptance within bot academia and industry. The current challenge is to incorporate aspect-oriented (AO) concepts into the software design phase. Since AOP is built on top of OOP, it seems natural to adapt UML to AO design. In this context the author introduces an extension to the UML metamodel to support aspect-oriented modelling.