An Aspect-Oriented Approach in Early Requirements Engineering

Abstract

There has been a significant body of work on separation of concerns (SoC) in the requirements engineering and architecture design communities. Techniques such as use cases, viewpoints and goals models help achieve separation of stakeholders concerns but ensuring their consistency with global requirements and constraints is largely unsupported. The work on early aspects, therefore, complements these approaches by providing systematic means for handling such concerns. In this paper we focus on a methodology to elicit the crosscutting concerns "aspects" in the early life phases of software development generally and especially during requirements analysis. Early aspects cannot be localized and tend to be scattered over multiple early life cycle modules. This reduces the modularity of the artifacts and might consequently lead to serious maintenance problems and low degree of reusability. Unfortunately, conventional aspect oriented software development approaches have mainly focused on identifying the aspects at the programming level and less attention has been taken on the impact of crosscutting concerns at the early phases of the software development.