Early aspects are crosscutting concerns that exist in requirements analysis, domain analysis and architecture design activities of software lifecycle. Work on early aspects focuses on systematically identifying, modularizing, and analyzing such crosscutting concerns and their impact at these early phases of the software development. The Early Aspects workshop provides a forum for an open set of early-aspects related topics.

Although submissions to the workshop are NOT restricted to a particular domain, the theme of this year's workshop at AOSD'10 is "Early Aspects and Climate Change". Climate change affects us all. Thus, we would like to encourage the early aspects community to consider what particular contributions the AO requirements and architecture design can contribute to tackling the climate change issues. For instance, since AOSD focuses on modularisation of crosscutting concerns, climate change lends itself as an excellent domain for
AOSD techniques. This is because such issues as carbon emission, energy use, nature conservation affect all areas of software (e.g., processor use, application archtiecture, requirements level trade-off analysis, modelling of the sustainability goals, etc.).

Thus, climate change can be addressed in software engineering in a multitude of ways, ranging from minimising the environmental impact of newly developed software to reducing the environmental impact of business processes, and creating software for analysing and understanding the climate-change effects. In all of these cases a range of crosscutting concerns will arise (environmental impact not least of them), making it natural to look to early-aspects technologies for their modularisation and treatment in software.

In summary, the specific objectives of this AOSD 2010 workshop are:
(a) Solicit submissions of new research on early aspects.
(b) Trigger work on identifying and tackling the problems related to climate change via the early aspects technology


Topics of Interest include, but are not limited to:

• Early Aspects and Climate Change
  • Climate Change as a crosscutting concern in early stages:
    • How to modularise environmental impact in an aspect?
    • What are the archtiectural patterns triggered by a "carbon neutral" NFR?
    • How does the "carbon neutral" NFR interact with other NFRs?
  • Techniques for modeling climate change with early aspects;
  • Case studies demonstating use of early aspects for tackling climate change issues in/with software;
• Aspect-oriented requirements engineering
  • Identification and modelling of aspects in requirements;
  • Composition of early aspects;
  • Use of requirements level aspects for conflict identification and resolution;
• Aspect-oriented domain engineering
  • Deriving aspects from domain knowledge;
  • Composition of domain aspects;
  • Beyond well-known crosscutting concerns;
  • Linking early aspects with domain-specific applications (Distributed software systems, software product lines, ambient intelligence, P2P systems)
• Mapping between aspect-oriented requirements, domain analysis and architecture
  • Formal or informal mappings;
  • Language features required to support aspect mapping;
• Aspect-oriented architecture design
  • Use of aspects to reason about architectures;
  • Evaluation of alternative architectures with aspects;
• Tool support and automation for aspect-orientation
• Formalisms and notations for specifying aspects
• Dynamic early aspects
  • Accommodation of run-time change in the requirement models;
  • Run-time variability resolution in requirements and architecture, etc.
• Evaluation of Early Aspects
  • Aspect-oriented evaluation methods;
  • Aspect-oriented metrics for early aspects;
  • Change impact analysis for early aspects;
• Early Aspects in Industry
  • Industry problems and practices;
  • Successful stories of adoption of early aspects in industry;
  • Empirical results;
• Composition-related issues for early aspects
  • Semantics;
  • Fragility;

Workshop format

The workshop will be highly interactive with a few presentations in the morning followed by group work for the rest of the day. The participants will work in small groups, formed based on their specific interests. The group work will be focused on making a tangible progress by identifying possible solutions of the discussion problems; by furthering the problem understanding; by providing practical examples and motivation for the discussion topics, etc. The last session of the workshop will be dedicated to integrating the results of the
group discussions into the overall workshop results.

Important dates:

• 08 January 2010 (Apia, Samoa time): Paper submission
• 18 January 2010 (Apia, Samoa time) : Notifications sent to authors.
• 21 January 2010: Camera-ready version.
• 15 March 2010: Workshop

Paper Submission guidelines

Prospective participants are invited to submit a 3-5 page position paper in standard ACM SIG Proceedings format (http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates). All papers must be submitted in PDF format. Submissions must use a 9pt size font.

All submissions will be reviewed by members of the program committee and the organizing committee for quality and relevance to AOSD. Each paper will be reviewed by at least 3 reviewers. Accepted papers will become part of the workshop proceedings and published on http://www.aosd-europe.net/eaAOSD10/.

Submissions should be sent to both rouza[at]comp.lancs.ac.uk and szschaler[at]acm.org.

Proceedings

Accepted papers will become part of the workshop proceedings and will also be published on workshop web site (http://www.aosd-europe.net/eaAOSD10/).

Program Committee (TO BE CONFIRMED)

Organising Committee

• Ruzanna Chitchyan, Lancaster University, UK (Primary Contact, contact at rouza_at_comp.lancs.ac.uk)
• Steffen Zschaler, Lancaster University, UK, (szschaler_at_acm.org)

Steering Committee

Updated 10 Nov 2009