Developing Aspect-Oriented Software Architectures: A Framework Definition

As the real world changes and evolves, software systems have to adapt in order to remain useful. For this reason, software engineers need techniques and tools which allow them to develop complex systems which are correct and easily adaptable. We here present a framework which provides the software engineer with a tool to design easily adaptable systems that evolve effortlessly. Changes are implemented from a structural point of view following the separation of concerns principle. We describe the characteristics of an aspect-oriented systems development model from an architectural viewpoint, a working methodology, and an aspect-oriented architecture description language.