Promoting the software evolution in AOSD with early aspects: Architecture-oriented model-based pointcuts

Aspect oriented systems suffer from an issue named pointcut fragility problem, which occurs when a poincut unintentionally captures or misses a given join point as a consequence of apparently harmless modifications of the base elements or system structure. One promising approach to cope with this problem is the definition of pointcuts in terms of elements of an intermediary conceptual model. In this paper we investigate the benefits of defining these conceptual models at early stages of the development. Concretely, we use the AO-ADL architectural language and, in particular, its support to define: (1) semantics-based compositions, and (2) parameterized architectural templates. We also demonstrate the feasibility of our approach through a case study.