TAO: A testbed for Aspect Oriented Software Development

Summary:

Despite the significant interest in AOSD, this emerging paradigm is still lacking strong empirical foundation. There is no testbed available for an end-to-end evaluation of AOSD techniques covering the software lifecycle phases, including requirements engineering, architecture design, detailed design, implementation, quality assurance, and evolution. Without such a testbed, AOSD techniques cannot be assessed and compared with existing ones for their contributions in terms of stringent qualities, such as modularity, reusability, and maintainability. In this context, the overall aim of this project is to develop a testbed for AOSD, called TAO, and to set up the infrastructure to capture and analyse relevant data for techniques utilising the testbed. The testbed development will be supported by the previous experience of the Lancaster AOSD team on the application of AOSD techniques to non-trivial application domains, such as multi-agent systems and databases.

The specific aims of this research project are:

1. Design of the testbed by identifying assessment issues to be explored in the software development phases, such as requirements engineering, architecture design, implementation, and quality assurance.
2. End-to-end realisation of a major case study, such as a context-sensitive tourist guide system, to form part of the testbed suite of studies.
3. Exploitation of the case study to identify candidate points of integration between our AOSD techniques.
4. Evaluation of the testbed using the AOSD techniques developed at Lancaster and gathering of empirical data based on the end-to-end case study.

Resources:

Requirements Architecture Design Implementation Publications Presentations ECOOP07 data