Challenge Problems for Separation of Concerns
Jonathan Aldrich · 2000
A number of techniques have been proposed to achieve a better separation of concerns in programming systems. How does one evaluate the benefits and drawbacks of the various alternatives, and offer guidance to the designers of future systems? This paper proposes a set of challenge problems for separation of concerns, each of which deals with different types or dimensions of concerns. Drawing from my experience with large, high-level object-oriented systems and from the separation of concerns literature, this paper classifies separation of concerns problems into a number of categories and chooses representative examples from each. I intend to continue this work by evaluating a range of current systems using these problems as benchmarks, and then using this experience to design better support for separation of concerns in the context of high-level object-oriented languages like Cecil. 1 Challenge Problems Challenge problems have long been useful in evaluating program design and implemen...