Distributing classes with woven concerns: an exploration of potential fault scenarios

Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) promises to benefit software engineering by providing a layer of abstraction that can modularize system-level concerns. AOP is still a very young area of research and has yet to receive mainstream acceptance in industry. As a result, the industry as a whole lacks experience and knowledge concerning long term maintenance issues with AOP in deployed commercial applications. Fault models that result from software maintenance in aspect-oriented software development (AOSD) are not nearly as well understood as they are for object-oriented software development (OOSD). This paper will explore some of the long-term maintenance issues that can occur with AspectJ, which is an implementation of AOP for the Java programming language. More specifically, the ability of AspectJ (as of version 1.2) to weave into existing bytecode that already contains woven aspects can create unexpected and potentially unsolvable problems. This will hopefully lead to further discussion in the research community that will result in a better understanding of the long-term maintenance issues inherent in AOSD.