Revealing Crosscutting Concerns in Textual Requirements Documents: An Exploratory Study with Industry Systems

Abstract

It is well-known that effective requirements analysis plays a crucial role in the quality of software systems. However, the scattered and tangled nature of certain system's concerns can hinder the proper understanding and treatment of import requirements. A key goal of prominent Aspect-Oriented Requirement Engineering (AORE) techniques, such as EA-Miner and Theme/Doc, is to support the automatic identification of crosscutting concerns at textual requirements documents. However, it is still unknown whether and which of these approaches produce accurate results in large text documents and according to the software engineers' expectations. In this context, this paper presents an analysis regarding the accuracy of the aforementioned AORE approaches when processing requirements of two industry software systems. Around 300 pages of requirements descriptions in these systems were the target of our investigation. In general, EA-Miner suffered more than Theme/Doc from the incompleteness and inconsistencies of requirements documents. In addition, other factors can differently influence each approach's accuracy, such as: the participation of requirements engineers, and the level of details provided in the requirements document.

Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering - A Systematic Mapping

“…For example, a study may provide an original solution to a problem while presenting a description of a controlled experiment for evaluating this approach ("validation study"). Question Q3: some studies (Herrera et al, 2012;Sampaio et al, 2007) describe that concern identification and classification activity is a bottleneck in the AORE process. While this activity serves as a basis for execution of the other activities, it is important to know: i) what types of techniques have been used for concern identification and classification; ii) what are the strengths and limitations of these techniques; and iii) which of them has been more used.…”

“…With regard to the question Q3, Table 6 presents the name and description of five concern identification and classification techniques and the approaches that use them. Some experimental studies (Herrera et al, 2012;Sampaio et al, 2007) describe that concern identification and classification activity is a bottleneck in the AORE process.…”

ObasCId(-Tool): an ontologically based approach for concern identification and classification and its computational support

“…Some experimental studies performed on the main AORE approaches [5][6][7][8] have pointed out the concern identification and classification as bottleneck activities. One of the possible causes of this is the lack of understanding about the software concern domain: there are few studies designed to provide a clear understanding about the software concern concepts, aiming to answer questions such as "which are the main properties of a concern?"…”

An Approach Based on Colored Petri net for Analysing and Modelling the Aspects

“…It accomplishments to tackle the flaw of OOP while performing the cross-cutting concerns. On the other hand, due to the requirement of patterns for addressing the cross-cutting concerns of a software model, AOP is still in an immature state [13,21,23]. In AOP the crosscutting concerns are implemented as aspects instead of fusing them into the core modules.…”

“…These methods are used to detect the crosscutting concerns in the various levels of software development process and such detection at initial stage is cheaper, faster and more advantageous than doing the modifications later on-the-fly [12,19,22,23].…”