Supporting software evolution with intentional software views

Abstract

Maintaining and evolving large software systems is hard. One underlying cause is that existing modularisation mechanisms are inadequate to handle crosscutting concerns. We propose intentional software views as an intuitive and lightweight means of modelling such concerns. They increase our ability to understand, modularise and browse the implementation by grouping together source-code entities that address a same concern. Alternative descriptions of the same intentional view can be provided and checked for consistency. In addition, the model supports the declaration, verification and enforcement of relations among intentional views. This facilitates software evolution by providing the ability to detect invalidation of important intentional relationships among concerns when the software is modified.