17 July 2006 - 13:45AOP and the division of labor

I am looking at AOP as an example of applying the theory of Division of Labor to development. With AOP it is possible to have different types of professionals working on the same project at the same time.
In theory a security expert would secure the application or even better a security expert in one domain would secure one part of the application, while a security expert in another domain would secure another part of the application, a transaction expert would trace transaction boundaries within the application, a concurrency engineer would serialize calls to a state repository in order to implement concurrent access, etc… I say this is possible in theory because managing this interaction takes some good managerial skills and processes, processes with which I am not familiar for the time being.
The division of labor is a process that scales very well in diversity and ultimately in complexity. Various tasks are assigned to people trained specifically for them and are executed in an efficient manner. At the end of it the process has managed to put together a product which is quite complex and has received input for people of various backgrounds. This could be very well the solution to managing complex interactions when developing software: dividing them into tasks which can be performed individually by experts and assembling them at the end. Just like when you have a coffee you don’t have to worry about growing a coffee tree, harvesting the beans and roasting them because someone else did that for you when you are writing an application you should not concern yourself with securing it or implemeting failover thru exception handling because someone else would do this as well.
The division of labor pulled the human race out of the Middle Ages and into the industrial age. Hopefully AOP will be able to pull large, complex projects out of the quagmire of pointless meetings, weekly merges, versions, etc… and into functional, deployed applications.

P.S. I wrote this post on the most horrible coffee I had in a long time. If it had an effect on the post itself I am sorry.
P.P.S. Separation of concerns resembles the division of labor as well.