D11: ASAAM-T: A Tool environment for Identifying Architectural Aspects

Bedir Tekinerdoğan, University of Twente
Frank Scholten, University of Twente

Thursday, March 17, 17:00
Friday, March 18, 11:30

ASAAM-T is a tool environment that implements the Aspectual Software Architecture Analysis Method (ASAAM), which is a scenario-based method for identifying architectural aspects. Like conventional software architecture analysis methods, ASAAM starts with characterizing scenarios that can be directly supported by the architecture (direct scenarios) and scenarios that require the redesign of the architecture (indirect scenarios). Some scenarios however can be scattered over different architectural components and tend to be very difficult to localize their impact in individual components. ASAAM introduces a set of heuristic rules to identify these so-called aspectual scenarios, and to derive architectural aspects. Based on the detailed impact analysis for a given set of scenarios, ASAAM also provides a categorization of the architectural components into cohesive components, composite components, tangled components and ill-defined components. The results of the detailed impact analysis can be used in aspect-oriented design and aspect-oriented programming.

ASAAM-T is implemented in the Eclipse Java platform and includes a tool for specifying the software architecture, a tool for specifying reusable scenarios, a tool for guided selection of scenarios, a tool for impact analysis of the scenarios on the given architecture, a tool for identification of architectural aspects, and finally a tool for categorization of the architectural components. Attendees of the demonstration will see a step-by-step evaluation of a software architecture for an industrial case and observe how the architectural aspects are identified using scenarios. The demonstration will be organized in three parts. The first part includes the specification of the architecture and the scenarios. The second part includes the guided selection of scenarios from a reusable scenario base. The third part of the demonstration will evaluate the impact of selected scenarios on the various architectural components and identify architectural aspects. We will also demonstrate different selections of scenarios and show the impact on the architecture and the architectural aspects.