Impact of Evolution of Concerns in the Model-Driven Architecture Design Approach

Separation of concerns is an important principle for designing high quality software systems and is both applied in the Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) and Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD). The AOSD and MDA techniques seem to be complementary to each other; historically AOSD has focused on modeling crosscutting concerns whereas MDA has focused on the explicit separation of platform independent concerns from platform specific concerns and the model-driven generation processes. In order to assess the benefits of AOSD for MDA we provide a systematic analysis on crosscutting concerns within the MDA context. The analysis consists of three steps. First, we define an abstract model of MDA transformation with respect to concerns. Second, we define a number of evolution scenarios that correspond to a selected list of crosscutting concerns. Third, we analyze the model transformations in MDA with respect to the abstract model, the evolution scenarios and the related crosscutting concerns. This analysis results in the definition of a number of key problems related to the integration and evolution of crosscutting concerns in the MDA approach. Based on this analysis we provide a set of recommendations for the language and the process that is used in the MDA approach.