Policies as design and implementation artifacts for non functional requirements
Feng Chen · 2002
The implementation of Non Functional requirements (NFRs) often results in scattered code in the whole system, because there are no modular design and implementation artifacts for NFRs. This thesis proposes to use policies as the design and implementation artifacts for NFRs. Relevant policy mechanisms are surveyed and characterized through a list of attributes. Two policy mechanisms PEOCL and Aspect are proposed to be used for designing and implementing NFRs. PEOCL is extended from Object Constraint Language and is used to represent design- level policies for NFRs. PEOCL policies are further mapped to aspects in AspectJ at the code level. An abstract aspect library is also developed to support this methodology. This methodology is validated and illustrated through a case study. This approach realizes modular design and implementation for NFRs and the decoupling of the design and implementation for NFRs and those for functional features, thus achieves readability, tracability, non-intrusive adaptation, evolvability, and reusability. Keywords : Non Functional Requirements (NFR), Quality Attributes, Policy, Rule-based system, Constraint, Advanced separation of Concerns, Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP), Reflection, Program Transformation/meta-programming, Software Development Methodology iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my supervisor, Professor Babak Esfandiari, for his constant guidance, patience, inspiration, advice and encouragement throughout the research work and the preparation of this thesis. I would also like to thank my family for their support, understanding and love during my study and research. v Table of Contents Abstract...........................................................................................................