Aspect-Oriented Requirements with UML

Abstract

Crosscutting concerns are responsible for producing spread and tangled representations throughout the software life cycle. Effective separation of such concerns is essential to improve understandability and maintainability of artefacts at the various software development stages. Aspect-oriented software development holds promise for the purpose. However, to date, most of the work in this area has concentrated on the implementation level. While the focus is shifting to earlier development stages such as design, very less work exists on separation of crosscutting concerns during requirements engineering. The goal of this paper is to handle the separation of crosscutting concerns at requirements level using UML. To accomplish this we identify and specify crosscutting concerns in separate modules, so that localization and hence, reusability and maintainability can be promoted. The UMLbased aspect-oriented requirements engineering mechanism has a two-fold impact. It makes it possible to identify tradeoffs among broadly scoped properties early on in the development cycle hence providing decision support for the stakeholders involved. At the same time, being based on UML, the approach adheres to a de-facto industry standard hence making it suitable for incorporation in existing requirements engineering practices.