Handling Conflicts in Aspectual Requirements Compositions - Transactions on Aspect-Oriented Software Development - page 144

Handling Conflicts in Aspectual Requirements
Compositions
Isabel Sofia Brito 1 , Filipe Vieira 2 , Ana Moreira 2 , and Rita A. Ribeiro 3
1 Escola Superior de Tecnologia e Gestão, Instituto Politécnico de Beja, Portugal
[e-mail]
2 CITI/Departamento de Informática, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal
[e-mail], [e-mail]
3 UNINOVA, Portugal
[e-mail]
Abstract. Composing aspectual concerns with base concerns may raise
conflicting situations that need to be identified and resolved. A conflict is
detected whenever two or more concerns that contribute negatively to each
other and have the same importance need to be composed together. This paper
discusses the use of Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) methods to
support aspectual conflict management in the context of Aspect-Oriented
Requirements Engineering. The final solution relies on the use of the obtained
concern rankings to handle unresolved conflicts. An illustrative example is
presented to discuss how MCDM methods can be used for aspectual conflict
handling.
1 Introduction
Certain specific types of concerns span traditional module boundaries (for example,
classes in an object-oriented decomposition). Concerns of this nature, known as
crosscutting concerns [3, 12], are responsible for producing tangled representations that
are difficult to understand and to evolve. A concern refers to a matter of interest which
addresses a certain problem that is important to one or more stakeholders. Aspect-
oriented software development (AOSD) [3, 12] aims at addressing crosscutting concerns
by providing means for their systematic identification, separation, representation and
composition [18]. Crosscutting concerns are encapsulated in separate modules, known as
aspects [15], and composition mechanisms are later used to weave them back with other
core modules.
This paper is based on our previous work on Aspect-Oriented Requirements
Engineering (AORE) [6, 7] focusing on the conflict management problem, also
discussed in [17, 18]. In [6] we proposed three main activities to support AORE:
identify concerns, specify concerns and compose concerns. In this current paper we
concentrate on the composition activity, where conflicting situations may emerge in a
given match point. A match point identifies specific locations in the base concerns
where other concerns' behavior (crosscutting or non-crosscutting) should be satisfied
[7]. In this context, a conflict occurs any time two or more concerns that contribute