Interaction Analysis in Aspect-Oriented Models

Aspect-oriented concepts are currently introduced in all phases of the software development life cycle. However, the complexity of interactions among different aspects and between aspects and base entities may reduce the value of aspect-oriented separation of cross-cutting concerns. Some interactions may be intended or may be emerging behavior, while others are the source of unexpected inconsistencies. It is therefore desirable to detect inconsistencies as early as possible, preferably at the modeling level. We propose an approach for analyzing interactions and potential inconsistencies at the level of requirements modeling. We use a variant of UML to model requirements in a use case driven approach. Activities that are used to refine use cases are the join points to compose crosscutting concerns. The activities and their composition are formalized using the theory of graph transformation systems, which provides analysis support for detecting potential conflicts and dependencies between rule-based transformations. This theory is used to effectively reason about potential interactions and inconsistencies caused by aspect-oriented composition. The analysis is performed with the graph transformation tool AGG. The automatically analyzed conflicts and dependencies also serve as an additional view that helps in better understanding the potential behavior of the composed system