Audience

For a wide range of situations, AOSD improves the software development process. This book offers a high-level introduction to the aspect-oriented approach, and gives instruction on a useful approach for identifying aspects in requirements, and for designing them in an aspect-oriented way using UML with a small number of extensions.

We have written this book for practitioners and early adopters of aspect-orientation. This book will be particularly helpful for those who are trying to answer the common questions of "What is an aspect?" and "Which aspects should I be coding?" This book gives you a starting point for thinking about aspects, and accounting for them in your requirements and design.

Even if you've been using aspect-oriented languages for a while, you can read this book to learn more about identifying aspect functionality in requirements documentation and how to plan for aspect-design and implementation. The Theme approach gives a flexible way to identify aspect-functionality, and a UML-based design modeling language that can describe aspects independently of programming language. Whatever your aspect-oriented programming language, the analysis and design approach and principles described in this book will be helpful and informative.

Of course, this book would also be helpful to academics or students wishing to learn more about the aspect-oriented paradigm.

For all readers, we assume that you are familiar with the object-oriented paradigm, and are comfortable with the UML notation.