Magiel Bruntink (CWI) received his PhD degree with honours on 17 March 2008 at Delft University of Technology (TUD). He investigated the phenomenon of idiomatic crosscutting concerns in embedded software. His research was particularly concerned with the renovation of those concerns using Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP). The PhD thesis is entitled Renovation of Idiomatic Crosscutting Concerns in Embedded Systems.
Crosscutting concerns are phenomena that are present in almost any (embedded) software system. They arise if the implementation of a concern -a requirement or design decision-does not fit neatly into the modular decomposition of a software system. A crosscutting concern cannot be confined to a single modular unit and therefore becomes scattered across the system. Automatic identification of such scattered code could be of great help during the maintenance of a software system.
The approach taken by Bruntink is that of renovation, i.e., a step-wise improvement process aimed at easing the evolution of legacy software systems. The legacy software system that was studied is the embedded control software of an ASML wafer scanner, a device used in the manufacturing process of integrated circuits. This software system consists of 15 million lines of code. Bruntink studied whether the use of AOP is beneficial compared to the idiomatic style of implementation used in the ASML software system.
Magiel Bruntink's research is carried out at CWI as part of the Ideals project. This project has been executed under the responsibility of the Embedded Systems Institute, and is partially supported by the Netherlands Ministry of Economic Affairs under the SenterNovem TS programme. At CWI Paul Klint acted as Bruntink's adviser.
More information can be found on the website of the Ideals project and on the CWI homepage of Magiel Bruntink.
