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Expressing aspectual interactions in design: evaluating three AOM approaches in the slot machine domain

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Abstract

In the context of an industrial project, we evaluated the implementation of the software of a casino slot machine. This software has a significant amount of crosscutting concerns that depend on and interact with each other as well as with the modular concerns. We therefore wished to express our design using an appropriate aspect-oriented modeling approach. We therefore evaluated three candidate methodologies: Theme/UML, WEAVR, and RAM to establish their suitability. Remarkably, only the last of the three has shown to allow an adequate expression of the interactions, albeit not fully explicit. The first two fall short because half of the interaction types cannot be expressed at all while the other half need to be expressed using a work-around that hides the intention of the design. Neither does RAM allow a fully explicit expression of interactions, but it would be the most adequate approach for the slot machine case.

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Notes

  1. A pseudonym, licensing restrictions prohibit us from using the real name.

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Acknowledgments

Many thanks go to Jörg Kienzle and his team at McGill for fluid conversations (via e-mail and other means) to help us with understanding RAM, receiving us at their lab, and co-modeling some diagrams of the slot machine.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. PLEIAD Laboratory, Computer Science Department (DCC), University of Chile, Santiago, Chile

    Johan Fabry

  2. LIFIA, Facultad de Informática, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, La Plata, Argentina

    Arturo Zambrano & Silvia Gordillo

  3. Departamento de Ciencia y Tecnología, Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Bernal, Argentina

    Arturo Zambrano

Authors
  1. Johan Fabry
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  2. Arturo Zambrano
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  3. Silvia Gordillo
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Johan Fabry.

Additional information

Communicated by Dr. Ana Moreira.

This article extends the article “Expressing Aspectual Interactions in Design: Experiences in the Slot Machine Domain” [14] that appeared in the Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE 14th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS 2011)

Johan Fabry is partially funded by FONDECYT project 1130253.

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Fabry, J., Zambrano, A. & Gordillo, S. Expressing aspectual interactions in design: evaluating three AOM approaches in the slot machine domain. Softw Syst Model 15, 881–905 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-014-0442-0

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