SPLAT: Software engineering Properties of Languages for Aspect Technologies

URL	http://aosd.net/workshops/splat/2004
Contact Email	splat04@cs.utwente.nl
Date	Monday, March 22, 2004
Organizers	Lodewijk Bergmans, University of Twente Kris Gybels, Vrije Universiteit Brussel Peri Tarr, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center Erik Ernst, University of Aarhus

The so-called "-ilities" are crucial yardsticks for the assessment of the quality of software engineering activities and products, e.g., modularity, comprehensibility, evolvability, and analyzability. Hence, designers and users of aspect-oriented languages and systems must understand the effect on the "ilities" of any aspect-oriented language, feature, system, or style that they choose to use. Most aspect-related capabilities provide some benefits, but they also incur some disadvantages. Such a tradeoff arises, for example, in connection with a dynamic weaving capability. This feature improves adaptability, but it may well adversely affect comprehensibility and analyzability, and sometimes, performance. It is critical to understand these tradeoffs.

Considering that software maintenance and evolution play a major role in schedules and budgets, it is highly detrimental if software artifacts are hard to understand, and modifications likely to introduce ill effects along with the intended changes. In particular, complex semantic interactions between the parts of a software system may impede desirable evolution or delay or prevent the elimination of annoying bugs.

This workshop will explore issues in designing AOSD languages and systems that promote good software engineering properties, particularly with respect to comprehensibility, predictability, evolvability, and semantic interactions---which includes an open-minded discussion about the tradeoffs associated with all the great new ideas.