EA-Miner

Abstract

Aspect-Oriented requirements engineering helps to achieve early separation of concerns by supporting systematic analysis of broadly-scoped properties such as security, real-time constraints, etc. The early identification and separation of aspects and base abstractions crosscut by them helps to avoid costly refactorings at later stages such as design and code. However, if not handled effectively, the aspect identification task can become a bottleneck requiring a significant effort due to the large amount of, often poorly structured or imprecise, information available to a requirements engineer. In this paper, we describe a tool, EA-Miner, that provides effective automated support for identifying and separating aspectual and non-aspectual concerns as well as their crosscutting relationships at the requirements level. The tool utilises natural language processing techniques to reason about the properties of the concerns and model their structure and relationships.