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AspectOCL: using aspects to ease maintenance of evolving constraint specification

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Abstract

Constraints play an important role in Model-Driven Software Engineering. Industrial systems commonly exhibit cross-cutting behaviors in design artifacts. Aspect-orientation is a well-established approach to deal with cross-cutting behaviors and has been successfully used for programming and design languages. In model-driven software engineering, the presence of cross-cutting constraints makes it difficult to maintain constraints defined on the models of large-scale industrial systems. In this work, we improve our previous work on AspectOCL, which is an extension of OCL that allows modeling of cross-cutting constraints. We provide the abstract and concrete syntax of the language. We add support for new constructs such as composite aspects and invariant specification on a package. We also provide tool support for writing cross-cutting constraints using AspectOCL. To evaluate AspectOCL, we apply it on benchmark case studies from the OCL repository. The results show that by separating the cross-cutting constraints, the number of constructs in the constraint specifications can be reduced to a large amount. AspectOCL reduces the maintenance effort by up to 55% in one case study. To explore the impact on maintenance time and accuracy, we also perform a controlled experiment with 90 student subjects. The results show that AspectOCL has a small magnitude of improvement in terms of maintenance time when compared to OCL, whereas modifications to OCL specification are more accurate. The post-experiment survey indicates that the majority of subjects favored AspectOCL, but faced challenges in applying aspect-orientation to constraint specification due to a lack of prior exposure.

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Notes

  1. https://github.com/hassansartaj/aocl

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Quest-UAV Dependability Laboratory, National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences, Islamabad, Pakistan

    Muhammad Uzair Khan, Hassan Sartaj, Muhammad Zohaib Iqbal, Muhammad Usman & Numra Arshad

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  1. Muhammad Uzair Khan
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  2. Hassan Sartaj
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  3. Muhammad Zohaib Iqbal
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  4. Muhammad Usman
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  5. Numra Arshad
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Correspondence to Muhammad Uzair Khan.

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Communicated by: Paul Grünbacher

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Appendix A: Cross-cutting OCL Constraints and AspectOCL Constraints

Appendix A: Cross-cutting OCL Constraints and AspectOCL Constraints

1.1 A.1 DBLP

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1.2 A.2 DresdenOCL SEPA Example

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1.3 A.3 EU-Rental

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1.4 A.4 Mondex-Imperative

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1.5 A.5 OS Commerce

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1.6 A.6 Royal and Loyal

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1.7 A.7 Sudoku

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Cross-cutting OCL constraints

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AspectOCL constraint

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Khan, M.U., Sartaj, H., Iqbal, M.Z. et al. AspectOCL: using aspects to ease maintenance of evolving constraint specification. Empir Software Eng 24, 2674–2724 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-019-09717-6

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