Best Paper And Most Influential Paper

The Best Paper award and the Most Influential Paper award are annual honours; the latter recognises work presented ten years before the award date. The $1,000 prize money is divided among the authors, and the award is based on the influence the paper exerted over the ten-year period following its presentation. The categories are either the Best Paper or the Most Influential Paper of the year.

Honour 1Most Influential Paper Award

The paper, published for the AOSD 2003 conference, has had enormous influence on subsequent activity in the field of aspect-oriented software development. As a paper focused on aspect-oriented research, it is grounded in requirements engineering as it regards modularity and AOSD. In its wake, researchers have intensified their efforts with different programming constructs, so that programmers can fully express their modularity requirements.

The impact of "Modularization and Composition of Aspectual Requirements" is that of one of the first — and most influential — papers to focus on the need for dedicated modularization support for cross-cutting concerns from the earliest stages of the software development lifecycle. The paper's proposition includes the separation of aspectual and non-aspectual requirements, plus composition guidelines, in modules portraying coherent abstractions and abiding by properly defined requirements.

Honour 2Best Paper Award

As the Best Paper award winner, the paper depicts the problem of modularizing reactive systems — a problem of real importance to the aspect-oriented software development family. The paper's discussion is rooted in practical data and case studies. It surveys the present state of the field with useful metrics, and finally inspires a research agenda by posing important, open questions — opening up more areas in need of further research.