Systematic Mapping Protocol - Coverage of Aspect-Oriented Methodologies for the Early Phases of the Software Development Life Cycle

The amount of aspect-oriented software development techniques and tools have been increasing for the last years but still they have not enough maturity and are not sufficiently spread to be included in a project leader's box of tools. Software development projects have to deal with many risks, and the main function of project leaders is to minimize them. The use of immature technologies, tools newcomers to the market, techniques that have not been tested enough, etc., would be very risky decisions to take by who has the responsibility to carry out a successful software development project. On the other hand, the availability of well-known tools and techniques and the adherence to standards and best practices will help professionals to make good estimates and to take better decisions. There is many proposals on aspect-oriented techniques, notations, tools, etc., but they have not yet unified on a common body of knowledge and none of them has become the most popular approach. We are interested in the early phases of the aspect-oriented SDLC which include the phases from the beginning of the life cycle until architecture design. We are interested in portraying the state of the art of aspect-oriented techniques and tools, in the identification of the standards they employ. Our goal is to collect all the available evidence, analyze it, and study the possibility of applying these techniques, tools and standards in real projects, taking advantage of the benefits of the aspect-oriented paradigm, by identifying the standard and widespread approaches, techniques, notations and tools present in the scientific literature and to verify if they were applied in the industry, by means of a systematic mapping of the literature published between 1995 and 2019.