Improving agile software development using extreme AOCE and aspect-oriented CVS

Abstract

Currently there are no concurrent versioning systems (CVS) designed to properly support agile software development. The existing CVS lacks user friendliness and it requires users to be fully experienced with the system before they can adequately use it. Also its asynchronous style of merging often leads to code loss. In this paper, we describe a novel CVS system, called the aspect-oriented CVS (AOCVS) and our newly derived agile software development methodology, extreme aspect-oriented component engineering (extreme AOCE). Unlike the general CVS which is used for a vast variety of projects, AOCVS was designed and developed specifically for extreme AOCE. Our CVS tool merges the changes in a synchronous/real time fashion; this in turn removes the hassle for the developers on having to resolve merging conflicts. We also describe how our implemented AOCVS can be used to provide functionalities that can assist developers to produce and distribute reusable code and to communicate and manage aspect-oriented agile projects more efficiently and effectively. Our novel agile approach and tool allows software developers to use the rich cross-cutting systemic concerns, their behaviour and properties in aspect-oriented components to refactor, maintain, add functionalities and test complex software systems more easily, rapidly and accurately.