Early aspects: a model for aspect-oriented requirements engineering

Abstract

Effective RE must reconcile the need to achieve separation of concerns with the need to satisfy broadly scoped requirements and constraints. Techniques such as use cases and viewpoints help achieve separation of stakeholders' concerns but ensuring their consistency with global requirements and constraints is largely unsupported. In this paper we build on recent work that has emerged from the aspect-oriented programming (AOP) community to propose a general model for aspect oriented requirements engineering (AORE). The model supports separation of crosscutting functional and nonfunctional properties at the requirements level. We argue that early separation of such crosscutting properties supports effective determination of their mapping and influence on artefacts at later development stages. A realisation of the model based on a case study of a toll collection system is presented.

Aspects across Software Life Cycle: A Goal-Driven Approach

“…It is important to articulate the advice and pointcut of a goal aspect. Such an exercise not only supports aspect-oriented requirements analysis [31], but also provides reusable information for implementing and validating aspects, as shown in Fig. 4.…”

“…Aspect-oriented concepts are modeled explicitly in requirements at the beginning of the development process. Advising tasks, which operationalize softgoals and relate to hard goals, are modularized as aspects and weaved into the goal model to enable aspect-oriented requirements analysis [31]. The resulting model, notably the goal model augmented with aspects, is amenable to be transformed into aspect-oriented programs (AOP) [17].…”

“…In particular, seven goal aspects were identified in [45], among which we choose security and usability aspects as two embedded units of analysis within the current case study. Such a selection is guided by the previous work in a familiar e-commerce domain, and represents a typical case and units of analysis since both security and usability are commonly discussed early aspects in the literature [31].…”

“…The AOSD community has recognized the importance of considering aspects early on in the software life cycle during analysis and design, as opposed to only at the implementation stage [31]. Aspects at the requirements level present stakeholder concerns that crosscut the problem domain, with the potential for a broad impact on questions of scoping, prioritization, and architectural design [26].…”

Using Aspect-Oriented Concepts in the Requirements Analysis of Distributed Real-Time Embedded Systems

“…Both approaches address the problem at the implementation level, however the handling of NFR must be taken into account as soon as possible to enhance the system design. This fact motivates pushing the separation of concerns to the early phases of the design, as in the Early-Aspects [12] approach.…”