This work proposes a model based approach for pointcut management in the presence ofevolution in aspect oriented systems. The proposed approach, called conceptual visionsbased pointcuts, is motivated by the observation of the shortcomings in traditionalapproaches pointcuts definition, which generally refer directly to software structure and/orbehavior, thereby creating a strong coupling between pointcut definition and the base code.This coupling causes the problem known as pointcut fragility problem and hinders theevolution of aspect-oriented systems. This problem occurs when all the pointcuts of eachaspect should be reviewed due to any software changes/evolution, to ensure that they remainvalid even after the changes made in the software.Our approach is focused on the pointcuts definition based on a conceptual model,which has definitions of the system's structure in a more abstract level. The conceptual modelconsists of classifications (called conceptual views) on entities of the business modelelements based on common characteristics, and relationships between these views. Thus thepointcuts definitions are created based on the conceptual model rather than directlyreferencing the base model. Moreover, the conceptual model contains a set of relationshipsthat allows it to be automatically verified if the classifications in the conceptual model remainvalid even after a software change. To this end, all the development using the conceptualviews based pointcuts approach is supported by a conceptual framework called CrossMDA2and a development process based on MDA, both also proposed in this work.As proof of concept, we present two versions of a case study, setting up a scenario ofevolution that shows how the use of conceptual visions based pointcuts helps detecting andminimizing the pointcuts fragility. For the proposal evaluation the Goal/Question/Metric(GQM) technique is used together with metrics for efficiency analysis in the pointcutsdefinition
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