Aspect-Oriented Software Engineering

Reading Response to Chapter 21
This chapter was a difficult read, the concepts presented were important but outlined in such a dry manner that I had trouble staying focused and absorbing all of the information. My main takeaways were the importance of identifying primary concerns, or as phrased in the book: "cross-cutting concerns".

It is important to do a few things in order to perform this cross-cutting of concerns. First one must identify the important system requirements. After identifying these requirements, system concerns should be separated in terms of functional, quality of service, policy, system and organizational concerns. Once this has been done we can identify the core concerns of a system are those that relate to its primary purpose, a bank will have requirements mostly relating to the functions of its systems (ATMs, Tellers, Accounting) and in relation to those function: the concern of security. In this situation the cross cutting concern would be the security of those systems.

It is important to identify these cross-cutting concerns, especially during the development of a system. It is not always possible to cover all of the requirements identified in the initial stages of development. As mentioned previously, there are always trade offs and if the core concerns are correctly identified and covered, then further development of the system will be much easier.