Managing crosscutting concerns in component based systems using a model driven development approach

In the last few years, Model-Driven Development (MDD), Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD), and Component-Based Software Development (CBSD) have become interesting alternatives for the design and construction of complex distributed applications. Although these methodological approaches share the principle of separation of concerns and their further integration as key factors to obtaining high-quality and evolvable large software systems, they usually each address this principle from their own particular perspective. In the present work, we combine Component-Based and Aspect-Oriented Software Developments in a Model Driven software process targeted at the development of complex systems. This process constitutes an enhancement of the separation of concerns by allowing the isolation of crosscutting concerns in both Platform Independent and Platform Specific models. Following a pure MDD philosophy, a set of model transformations are used to generate the system, from preliminary models to the final source code for the Corba Component Model platform. A twofold empirical analysis was used to evaluate the approach’s benefits in terms of two internal quality attributes: modularity and complexity. Conclusions were drawn from this evaluation regarding other quality attributes correlated with these two – stability, changeability, error-proneness, and reusability. An Eclipse plug-in was developed to drive the development of the entire system from early modeling to late deployment stages.