The crosscutting impact of the AOSD Brazilian research community

Abstract

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.