Transactions on Aspect-oriented Software Development VI : Special Issue on Aspects and Model-driven Engineering

work for small problems, but it introduces signi?cant accidental complexities when tackling larger problems. Notethattherealchallengehereisnothowtodesignthesystemtotakeap- ticular aspect into account: there is signi?cant design know-how in industry on this and it is often captured in the form of design patterns. Taking into account more than one aspect can be a little harder, but many large scale successful projects in industry provide some evidence that engineers know how di?erent concerns should be handled. The real challenge is reducing the e?ort that the engineerhasto expendwhengrapplingwithmanyinter-dependentconcerns.For example, in a product-line context, when an engineer wants to replace a variant of an aspect used in a system, she should be able to do this cheaply, quickly and safely. Manually weaving every aspect is not an option. Unlike many models used in the sciences, models in software and in lingu- tics have the same nature as the things they model. In software, this provides an opportunity to automatically derive software from its model, that is, to - tomate the weaving process. This requires models to be formal, and the weaving process be described as a program (i.e., an executable meta-model) manipul- ing models to produce a detailed design. The detailed design produced by the weaving process can ultimately be transformed to code or at least test suites.

The LNCS journal Transactions on Aspect-Oriented Software Development is devoted to all facets of aspect-oriented software development (AOSD) techniques in the context of all phases of the software life cycle, from requirements and design to implementation, maintenance and evolution. The focus of the journal is on approaches for systematic identification, modularization, representation and composition of crosscutting concerns, and evaluation of such approaches and their impact on improving quality attributes of software systems.

This volume, the sixth in the Transactions on Aspect-Oriented Software Development series, focuses on the theme of aspects and model-driven engineering. The seven papers included in this issue give an in-depth coverage of the following topics: methods and techniques supporting separation, composition, and evolution of aspects identified in different development phases; simulation of runtime weaving of aspects using aspect-oriented models; techniques for verifying and validating aspect-oriented models; AOM case studies that provide significant insights into how aspect-oriented modeling techniques can be applied across the development life-cycle; tool support for use of integrated AOSD and MDE techniques; and language support for aspect-oriented modeling.