Improving Incremental Development in AspectJ by Bounding Quantification

Don Batory

Abstract: Incremental software development is a process of building complex programs from simple ones by progressively adding programmatic details. It is an effective and common design practice that helps control program complexity. However, incrementally building software using aspects can be difficult. AspectJ quantification does not distinguish different developmental stages, and thus pointcuts can capture join points from later stages that they originally were not intended to advise.

We present a model of aspect composition in AspectJ and propose an alternative model that preserves the power of AspectJ but also provides support for incremental development and 'as-is' reuse of aspects.