Separation and Composition of Concerns through Synthesis-Based Design

A fundamental principle in software engineering in managing complexity and improving quality is the separation of concerns principle. Despite the general consensus on the importance of this principle, its application remains difficult. In this paper we discuss the origin of concerns and propose a synthesis-based design process for the identification, specification and realization of concerns. Synthesis is a widely applied problemsolving technique of mature engineering disciplines and aims to find the relevant concerns of a problem, using the sub-processes of technical problem analysis, identification and composition of solution domain concerns, and alternative-space analysis. We will explain the approach for the analysis of the concerns for failure recovery in atomic transaction systems