Aspect-oriented specification: a case study in space domain

Abstract

Aspect-oriented software development claims to improve several software engineering principles, such as modularization, abstraction and composition. The Aspect for the Space Domain project (ASSD) developed a metadata-driven approach for aspect-oriented requirements analysis. The main objectives of the ASSD project, funded by the European Space Agency, were to study the applicability and usefulness of aspect-orientation for the space domain (ground segment software projects in particular), focusing on the early stages of the software development life cycle. Therefore, this paper describes a rigorous representation for requirements analysis concepts, refines an approach for handling early aspects, and proposes a client/server architecture based on a metadata repository. The ASSD approach has been validated with two space domain case studies.