Concern impact analysis in configurable system software: the AUTOSAR OS case

ABSTRACT

System software for cost-sensitive special purpose-systems has to be configurable and tailorable. AOSD should be beneficial for this purpose, as it provides means to untangle the system's concerns in a very fine-grained way. An important prerequisite for a fine-grained software design based on aspects is, however, that all concerns and their interactions present in the system have been comprehensively captured and understood.

We propose a method called Concern Impact Analysis for this purpose. Based on a system's specification, CIA provides a guideline to iteratively grasp the concerns present in a system, and their interactions. A speciality of CIA is that it also takes unspecified "internal" concerns into consideration as early as possible. We have tested CIA with the AUTOSAR OS specification and the design of our CiAO operating system family, where it led to a very fine-grained, aspect-aware kernel design.

REFERENCES

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.2 Design Tools and Techniques

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.4 OPERATING SYSTEMS
      D.4.7 Organization and Design
          Subjects: Real-time systems and embedded systems

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation, Languages

Keywords:
AOP, AOSD, AUTOSAR, CiAO, aspect-aware operating system, aspect-oriented design, configurability