Computer Engineering Commons^™

An Aspect-Based Approach To Checking Design Constraints At Run-Time, Yoonsik Cheon, Carmen Avila, Steve Roach, Cuauhtemoc Munoz, Neith Estrada, Valeria Fierro, Jessica Romo

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Design decisions and constraints of a software system can be specified precisely using a formal notation such as the Object Constraint Language (OCL). However, they are not executable, and assuring the conformance of an implementation to its design is hard. The inability of expressing design constraints in an implementation and checking them at runtime invites, among others, the problem of design drift and corrosion. We propose runtime checks as a solution to mitigate this problem. The key idea of our approach is to translate design constraints written in a formal notation such as OCL into aspects that, when applied to …