The 1997 introduced aspect-oriented programming paradigm promises to increase flexibility of software by increasing modularity through the separation of crosscutting concerns. We will show how AOP is aiming to keep its promise by giving an overview of its concepts, explained in a simple example. However, AOP is not only limited to the software level. With the emergence of service-oriented application development (SOAD), the adaptability of services and processes has gained more and more importance. AOP offers the concepts and techniques to improve adaptability needs, as we will show. We will give an overview of why software adaptability is needed and present an approach based on web service technologies applying AOP. Subsequently, we are going to discuss process adaptability as well. A classification of approaches will be given and this paper will present three concrete approaches for the de-facto standard BPEL, showing that aspect-oriented programming can not only increase the agility of programming in the small, but also of programming in the large.