Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Guest Editors' Introduction: Early Aspects—Analysis,
Visualization, Conflicts and Composition
João Araújo
1
and Elisa Baniassad
2
1
Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal
ja@di.fct.unl.pt
2
Chinese University of Hong Kong, China
elisa@cse.cuhk.edu.hk
Early Aspects are aspects found in the early life cycle phases of software development,
including requirements elicitation and analysis, domain analysis and architecture design
activities. Aspects at these stages crosscut the modular units appropriate for their
lifecycle activity; traditional requirements documentation, domain knowledge capture
and architectural artifacts do not afford separate description of early aspects. As such,
early aspects necessitate new modularizations to be effectively captured and maintained.
Without new tools and techniques, early aspects remain tangled and scattered in lifecycle
artifacts, and may lead to development, maintenance and evolution difficulties.
The Early Aspects community has grown significantly since its inception as a
workshop at the first conference on Aspect Oriented Software Development in 2001.
Since then, the workshop series has flourished, becoming a regular feature of several
conferences, and papers presenting and studying new Early Aspects techniques have
been published in many major venues. Early aspects research groups now span the
globe, and bridge industry and academia.
The level of maturity reached by the Early Aspects work prompted us to edit this
special issue on Early Aspects. We believe that this issue will support the cross-
fertilization of ideas between those focused on research throughout all phases of the
software lifecycle, and will help researchers identify new questions in the world of
Early Aspects.
Overview of the Articles and the Evaluation Process:
This special issue consists of
eight articles, selected out of ten submissions. Each were evaluated by three reviewers
and revised at least twice over a period of seven months.
The Early Aspects special issue covers three main areas of research, and is split
over two volumes of the journal. This volume presents papers in the areas of Analysis
and Visualization, and Conflicts and Composition. Volume. IV contains papers on
mapping early aspects throughout the lifecycle.
1 Analysis and Visualization
Early aspects research often involves examination of existing, traditionally organized,
artifacts, and refactoring them into an aspect-oriented organization. This process
might encompass identification of aspects in early requirements documents,
examination of the relevance of early aspects in a certain type of artifact, how early
