Most Influential Paper Award

Presented annually to the authors of a paper presented at the AOSD held 10 years prior to the award year, the award includes a prize of € 1000 to be split among the authors of the winning paper. The papers are judged by their influence over the past decade.

Modularisation and composition of aspectual requirements
Awais Rashid, Ana Moreira, João Araújo AOSD'03, ACM publication, pages: 11 - 20

The paper "Modularisation and composition of aspectual requirements", by Awais Rashid, Ana Moreira, João Araújo published at the AOSD'03 Conference Proceedings has had a large impact on various research activities in the aspect-oriented community (96 ACM DL and 450 Google Scholar citations).

In its early years, the aspect-oriented research was mainly focused on programming languages. Researchers had been investigating new programming language constructs to enable programmers to express their modularity needs. The paper "Modularisation and composition of aspectual requirements" was one of the first and most influential papers that emphasized the importance of dedicated support for the modularization of crosscutting concerns early in the software development lifecycle. The the paper proposed separation of the specification of aspectual requirements, non-aspectual requirements, and composition rules in modules representing coherent abstractions and following well defined templates.

In the following years, the "early aspects" research community formed and attracted a considerable number of researchers. This resulted in several workshops as well as a large number of follow-up conference and journal publications, all bearing witness to the high impact of the paper "Modularisation and composition of aspectual requirements".

Best Paper Award