Extracting updating aspects from version differences

Abstract

Dynamic software evolution represents a viable technique to update software systems at run-time. On-the-fly updating is particularly helpful for systems that must be continuously available and up-to-date. Updates consist of several incremental changes that must be applied to a system. These individual changes exhibit symptoms similar to crosscutting concerns: they are typically scattered across several classes. We therefore leverage aspect technology and use aspects to encapsulate the changes constituting an update. In addition, dynamic aspect systems can serve as a practicable platform to inject updates at run-time. In this paper, we present how we extract the updating aspects for a dynamic aspect system. We detail the algorithms necessary to generate such updating aspects that rely on the computation of the dependences between the changes to determine the granularity of an aspect.