Call for Participation

One of the most important principles in software engineering for coping with complexity and achieving quality software is the separation of concerns principle. This principle states that a given design problem involves different kinds of concerns, which should be identified and separated in different modules. The history of software development has experienced an evolution of different programming languages and design methods that have provided useful modularity mechanisms. However, as it is experienced in practice and generally acknowledged by researchers, it appears that these approaches are inherently unable to modularize all concerns of complex software systems. Some concerns like synchronization, recovery and logging tend to be more systemic, crosscut a broader set of modules and as such cannot be easily specified in single modules. This increases complexity and reduces several quality factors of software, such as adaptability, maintainability and reusability.

Aspect-oriented software development (AOSD) is an advanced technology for separation of concerns (SOC), which provides explicit concepts to modularize the crosscutting concerns and compose these with the system components.

In Turkey, we have started the workshop series on AOSD with the First Aspect-Oriented Software Development Workshop which has been organized in June 2003. The Second Aspect-Oriented Software Development Workshop has been organized in September 2007.

With this workshop we aim to further stimulate the research and education on AOSD in Turkey. Meanwhile we have also developed a broad category of aspects that are identified and implemented in the projects. The workshop is organized within the  AOSD (graduate) course that is given at Bilkent University. The course provides an in-depth analysis of AOSD and teaches the state-of-the-art AOSD techniques. An essential part of the course are the projects that the students had to fulfill to complete the course. During the projects complex cases have been selected from industry and ongoing projects at the university and these were analysed for aspects and reengineered as aspect-oriented designs. Aspect-oriented programs have been implemented in AspectJ and a comparison is made with other AOP approaches. This resulted in a unique collection of valuable aspect-oriented designs which shows the strengths and weaknesses of various AOP approaches. We think that the results of these projects are of interest to a broader public and as such would like to share our experiences in this workshop.

In particular, the goals of this workshop are the following:

  • Share knowledge and improve consciousness on AOSD

    We can observe a widespread use of AOSD in the world. It is being teached in universities, companies apply AOSD techniques, conferences and workshops are organized regularly, and large projects on AOSD are funded.  The primary goal of this workshop is to foster the consciousness about this key concept in software engineering and provide an objective evaluation.
     
  • Stimulate research and education on AOSD

    We hope to stimulate the research and education in Turkey with respect to aspect-oriented software development. Researchers will find a forum and a channel to present and share their ideas. Educators will find the important topics in aspect-oriented software development and include these in their courses.

  • Stimulate MSc and PhD students to do research in AOSD

AOSD is one of the important developments in the software engineering in the last decade. We hope that the workshop will stimulate MSc and PhD students to do research on AOSD and related topcs.

We invite interested persons from both industry and academic institutions to attend the workshop.