Managing aspect orderings to support multiple quality concerns

Abstract

When multiple aspects are composed undesired behavior may emerge due to the interference of aspects. Different interference management approaches have been proposed including detection and resolution of the conflicting aspects. It appears that the majority of the existing approaches have basically focused on functional correctness, whereby orderings of aspects are evaluated with respect to assumed contractual specification. Although functional correctness is an important quality concern also other quality concerns such as evolvability, reuse and reliability can demand a specific ordering. As such, the resulting possible set of orderings might need to be further reduced. In this paper we discuss the impact of other quality concerns than functional correctness, on the required orderings of aspects. Based on a domain analysis of existing approaches we provide a feature model and complementary to this a metamodel for defining aspect interference management approaches for multiple quality concerns. Copyright 2009 ACM.