Analysis of Crosscutting in Early Software Development Phases Based on Traceability - Transactions on Aspect-Oriented Software Development - page 102

modularity, reusability, evolvability or adaptability can be enhanced by means of an
early identification of crosscutting.
An interesting application of our framework is the analysis of crosscutting across
several levels in software development, for example from concern modeling to
requirements, or from architectural design to detailed design and implementation.
This analysis is formalized by means of cascading the crosscutting pattern. As such, it
provides an approach for traceability analysis. We showed the application of the
approach to some case studies to identify crosscutting. The operationalization of
crosscutting with matrices constitutes a helpful means to analyze crosscutting in
different scenarios or domains.
Other applications of our framework have been studied. Since evolvability in
systems can be influenced by crosscutting, change impact analysis of crosscutting has
been carried out in [7]. The framework has been applied to analyze the impact of
crosscutting on MDA model transformations [11]. On the other hand, the framework
may help developers not only to identify crosscutting but also to assess the degree of
crosscutting in a system. In that sense, the crosscutting product matrix described in
Sect. 3.2 provides important information for this purpose. We are investigating the
definition of crosscutting metrics based on the crosscutting product matrices. Further
research should show the scalability of this approach and provide support for different
types of trace relations.
Acknowledgment. This work has been carried out in conjunction with the AOSD-
Europe Project IST-2-004349-NoE (see [1]) and also partially supported by MEC
under contract TIN2005-09405-C02-02. We would like to thank Ana Moreira for her
comments and suggestions. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers
who provided constructive comments and suggestions to enhance this work.
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