Overview of Aspect Oriented Software Development (AOSD)

Aspect oriented software development defines aspects that express customer concerns that cut across multiple system functions, features, and information. It provides a process and methodological approach for defining, specifying, designing, and constructing aspects - mechanisms beyond subroutines and inheritance for localizing the expression of a crosscutting concern.
Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) provides the ability to intercept code execution with the purpose of inserting a process before, in place of, or after the code that would normally execute.

Predominant reasons for AOSD are:
- Help solve the issue of messy object architectures.
- Object oriented programming has difficulty dealing with global information.
- Also, functionality that requires the involvement of several different objects (possibly collected into a component) results in interdependency between those objects/components. This makes the application susceptible to the implementation changes of a dependent object/component.
- Maintenance and enhancement are also problems, as the interaction between these objects/components are typically hard coded within the containing object.

AOSD programming technologies (aspect-oriented programming, or AOP) provide linguistic mechanisms for separate expression of concerns, along with implementation technologies for weaving these separate concerns into working systems. Aspect-oriented software engineering (AOSE) technologies are emerging for managing the process of developing systems within this new paradigm.