Early aspects: a model for aspect-oriented requirements engineering

TLDR

Effective RE must balance separation of concerns with satisfying broad requirements, yet existing techniques such as use cases and viewpoints lack robust support for ensuring consistency with global constraints. The paper proposes a general model for aspect‑oriented requirements engineering (AORE) based on recent AOP research. The model separates crosscutting functional and non‑functional properties at the requirements level and is instantiated in a toll‑collection system case study. Early separation of crosscutting properties facilitates determining their mapping and influence on later artefacts.

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. 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 non-functional 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.