Towards MDD transformations from AO requirements into AO architecture

Aspect-Oriented (AO) Software Development has been created to offer improved separation of concerns mechanisms. AO concepts first appeared at the programming level and are now being addressed at the early stages of the software development life cycle. Currently, there are several AO approaches available for the various software development phases, but each one usually encompasses a single phase of the software process. This results in a wide gap between proposals at different levels of abstractions, raising several problems when trying to map artifacts between proposals from adjoining levels. This gap is clearly noticeable when an AO architecture design is intended to be derived from an AO requirements specification, since some requirements artifacts in AO approaches cannot be easily mapped to architectural artifacts. This paper explains how to reduce this gap by using model transformations between AO requirements engineering models and AO architecture design models. The goal is to automate part of the process of deriving an AO software architecture from an AO requirements specification.