Managing Variability Complexity in Aspect-Oriented Modeling

Aspect-Oriented Modeling (AOM) approaches propose to model reusable aspects that can be applied to different systems at the model level. To improve reusability, several contributions have pointed out the needs of variability in the AOM approaches. Nevertheless, the support of variability makes the aspect design more complex and the introduction of several dimensions of variability (advice, pointcut and weaving) creates a combinatorial explosion of variants and a risk of inconsistency in the aspect model. As the integration of an aspect model may be a complex task, the AOM framework has to be a support for the designer to ensure the consistency of the resulting model. This paper presents an approach describing how to ensure that an aspect model with variability can be safely integrated into an existing model. Verification includes static checking of aspect model consistency and dynamic checking through testing with a focus on the parts of the model that are impacted by the aspect.