Background: Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD) is a paradigm that promotes advanced separation of concerns and modularity throughout the software development lifecycle, with a distinctive emphasis on modular structures that cut across traditional abstraction boundaries. In the last 15 years, research on AOSD has boosted around the world. The AOSD-BR research community (AOSD-BR stands for AOSD in Brazil) emerged in the last decade, and has provided different contributions in a variety of topics. However, despite some evidence in terms of the number and quality of its outcomes, there is no organized characterization of the AOSD-BR community that positions it against the international AOSD Research community and the Software Engineering Research community in Brazil. Aims: In this paper, our main goal is to characterize the AOSD-BR community with respect to the research developed in the last decade, confronting it with the AOSD international community and the Brazilian Software Engineering community. Method: Data collection, validation and analysis were performed in collaboration with several researchers of the AOSD-BR community. The characterization was presented from three different perspectives: (i) a historical timeline of events and main milestones achieved by the community; (ii) an overview of the research developed by the community, in terms of key challenges, open issues and related work; and (iii) an analysis on the impact of the AOSD-BR community outcomes in terms of well-known indicators, such as number of papers and number of citations. Results: Our analysis showed that the AOSD-BR community has impacted both the international AOSD Research community and the Software Engineering Research community in Brazil. (c) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.864905933National Institute of Science and Technology for Software Engineering (INES) [573964/2008-4, APQ-1037-1.03/08]National Institute of Science and Technology for Software Engineering (INES) [573964/2008-4, APQ-1037-1.03/08]