The 8th International Conference on Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD.09)
March 2-6, 2009
Charlottesville, Virginia, USA
Held at the University of Virginia

Conference Home

Industry Papers

Important Dates
Abstract submission: Saturday, September 27, 2008, 23:59 (Samoan)
Submission: Sunday, October 5, 2008, 23:59 (Samoan)
Note: papers that did not submit an abstract on Sep. 27 will still be accepted
Acceptance notification: Monday, December 8, 2008
Camera-ready: Thursday, January 8, 2009, 23:59 (Samoan)

The AOSD.09 Industry Track seeks papers from industrial researchers and practitioners of software and software-intensive systems development with the potential to increase our understanding of and ability to exploit modularity and abstraction. Of special interest are success-critical concerns that are hard to manage because they cut across traditional abstraction boundaries. This Call for Papers summarizes the problem and current state of industrial uptake of aspect-oriented concepts, methods, and tools, and then provides instruction on how to organize, format, and submit papers for consideration for publication and presentation at the AOSD.09 conference.

Managing the development, operation, and evolution of complex software-intensive systems requires effective modularization and abstraction. More than a decade of research in the area known as aspect-oriented software development (AOSD) strongly suggests that traditional mechanism for abstraction and modularity are not entirely adequate to support effective modularization and abstraction in all of the requisite dimensions. The consequence is that important concerns tend to be lost in details and decisions that are spread across a given system. Researchers have thus been developing and evaluating new concepts, methods, languages, tools and techniques to enable better separation of concerns in such systems that can be broadly labeled as Aspect-Oriented.

Complex systems in many domains incur unnecessary costs and risks because they face the same problems that the AOSD research community has been studying. Industrial adoption has been strong in a few major areas, notably in enterprise computing middleware systems, but lags in other areas. Broader engagement with AOSD approaches appear to hinge on the removal of a number of roadblocks. These include a perceived lack of sufficiently mature and validated concepts, methods and tools; the cost and difficulty of learning to abstract in new dimensions; and concerns about the costs and risks involved in relaxing the enforcement of traditional abstraction boundaries, which some AOSD methods entail (including the notion that code in one module can implicitly influence the behavior of code in another module).

These impediments notwithstanding, AOSD concepts, tools and methods are increasingly delivering value to industrial practitioners in several dimensions. Tool support is improving through the efforts of numerous commercial vendors and open-source communities. AOSD concepts are transcending their origins in programming language constructs and are now influencing such activities as model-based development, system specification, self-adaptive control, and the governance of complex systems. In short, the problems are both real and fundamental, and solutions are continuing to evolve. Some are showing significant promise. Some are providing significant financial value today.

In this context, the AOSD.09 Industry Track seeks contributions from industrial researchers and practitioners based on experience with either the problems that AOSD addresses or with emerging AOSD techniques. The Industry Track takes a deliberately broad view of Aspect Orientation. Major topics of interest this year include but are not limited to the following:

  • Industrial points of view: experiences, applications, open issues
  • Carefully evaluated applications of AOSD technologies
  • AOP-based software architectures and software engineering techniques
  • Middleware and Infrastructures for AOP support
  • Relationship with other computational models such as object-oriented, declarative (functional, logic, constraint), programming or their extensions with coordination capabilities
  • Formal aspects (semantics, reasoning, verification)
  • Aspect mining
  • Evolution and reverse engineering
  • Crosscutting program views
  • Aspect-related refactoring
  • Requirements
  • Aspect Oriented Domain-Specific Languages
  • Aspect-Oriented modularity in organizations and governance
  • Novel models, languages, programming and implementation techniques

Submission Requirements

Abstracts and papers should be submitted by email to the Industry Program Chairs (Robert Baillargeon and Mark Grechanik) at industry at aosd.net. Please do not use CyberChair for Industry Track submissions. All papers must be submitted in PDF format. Two lengths of submissions are possible: a short submission of 6 pages or a long submission not more than 12 pages (including bibliography and any appendices). Submissions must be in the standard ACM SIG Proceedings format and must use a 9pt size font.

Each paper should explain its application of AO in the industrial context and the resulting positive (or negative value) of using AO techniques. Additionally, authors are encouraged to give constructive guidance as to how the research space can extend to address their current and future challenges faced in industry. Authors should strive to make the technical content of their papers understandable to a broad audience.

Prospective authors are welcome to direct any questions and mentorship requests to the Industry Program Chairs (Mark Grechanik and Robert Baillargeon) at industry at aosd.net.

Accepted Paper Instructions

Authors of accepted industry papers should keep in mind the hard deadline for submission of their camera-ready paper (January 8th). Specific details about preparing the final camera-ready version are available at http://www.sheridanprinting.com/typedept/aosd.htm.