Renovation of idiomatic crosscutting concerns in embedded systems

Renovation of idiomatic crosscutting concerns in embedded systems

Bruntink, M.

Van Deursen, A. (promotor)
Klint, P. (promotor)

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

2008-03-17

Crosscutting concerns are phenomena that are present in almost any (embedded) software system. They arise if the implementation of a concern "a requirement or design decision" does not fit neatly into the modular decomposition of a software system. A crosscutting concern cannot be confined to a single modular unit and therefore becomes scattered across the system and tangled with other concerns. This thesis focuses on the specific class of idiomatic crosscutting concerns, which are crosscutting concerns that are idiomatic in the sense that they are implemented manually by applying an idiom, resulting in many similar pieces of source code. The approach taken is that of renovation, i.e., a step-wise improvement process aimed at easing the evolution of legacy software systems. The legacy software system that is studied in this thesis is the (embedded) control software of an ASML wafer scanner, a device used in the manufacturing process of integrated circuits. This software system consists of 15 million lines of C code. We study whether the use of AOP is beneficial compared to the idiomatic style of implementation used in the ASML software system.

crosscutting concerns
idioms
aspect-oriented programming
program analysis
program transformation
renovation
reengineering
reverse engineering

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:576da4a7-781c-4950-a36e-2366211022a7

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Institutional Repository

doctoral thesis

(c) 2008 M. Bruntink