An aspect-oriented UML tool for software development with early aspects

Aspect-oriented Component Engineering uses early aspects to better categorize and reason about provided and required services of individual components in software systems. Our earlier work on AOCE demonstrated an increase in the reusability and understandability of software components and systems via its usage of early requirements and design-phase aspects but lacked adequate tool support. We describe a novel design tool called Aspect-Oriented UML (AO-UML) that can be used to efficiently capture and manage early aspects for software development using the Aspect-oriented Component Engineering methodology. The key benefits of our tool are its use throughout the development lifecycle and its ability to support and take advantage of Aspect-Oriented Component Engineering's features and capabilities.