Background and Objectives:

Many concerns pertaining to software development have a crosscutting impact on a system. Using current technologies, such kinds of concerns are difficult to identify, understand, and modularize at design and implementation time, as they cut across the boundaries of many components of a system. Crosscutting concerns typically include design constraints and features, as well as architectural qualities and system-level properties or behaviors, such as transactions, logging and error recovery, etc.

Aspect-oriented software development (AOSD) is an emerging technology promoting advanced separation of concerns in software engineering. AOSD techniques allow one to modularize crosscutting concerns into separate “aspects” of a system and integrate those aspects with other kinds of modules throughout the software development lifecycle.

Aspect-oriented modeling is a critical part of AOSD that focuses on techniques for identifying, analyzing, managing and representing crosscutting concerns in software design and architecture, while filling the gap between aspect-oriented requirements engineering and aspect-oriented programming.

This workshop is dedicated to the definition of aspect-oriented modeling techniques, methods and tools based on UML. Suggested issues are: How can we apply UML artifacts to AOSD? Are the existing notations and modeling techniques of UML sufficient to model aspects, or do we need to extend UML to support AOSD? Is UML the appropriate modeling language on which to base modeling for AOSD? Is UML capable of expressing "Core" components and "Aspectual" components as well as associations linking them together? If we have to extend the UML, are the extension mechanisms provided by UML adequate? What could then be a UML profile for AOSD? Or would it be possible to rely only on a restricted subset of the UML for AOSD? What would this subset be?

Invited Talk: "Use Cases and Aspects – Working Together", by Ivar Jacobson, Rational, Inc.

Position papers & Workshop Agenda