An aspect-oriented approach to supporting the design of system software

The benefits associated with separation of concerns are well established It is difficult to design system software to meet a better separation of concerns, which can provide a number of benefits such as comprehension, reusability, extensibility, and reconfigurability in both the design and implementation. In order to maximize these benefits, advanced separation of concerns techniques are required in both design and implementation. During design, some aspects, such as synchronization, scheduling, performance and fault tolerance, cut across the basic functionalities of the system software. By separating the different aspects of the system software in the design, we can provide a better generic design model of system software. Aspect-Oriented Programming is a methodology that aims at separating components and aspects from the early stages of the software life cycle, and using techniques to combining them together at the implementation phase. In this paper we discuss an aspect-oriented framework that can simplify system design by expressing it at a higher level of abstraction. Our work concentrates on how to achieve a higher separation of aspects, components, and layers from each other. Our goal is to achieve a better design model for system software in terms of flexibility, reuse and adaptability.