Finding Aspects in Requirements with Theme/Doc

Abstract

Aspects are behaviours that are tangled and scattered across a system. In requirements documentation, aspects manifest themselves as descriptions of behaviours that are intertwined and interdependent. Some aspects may be obvious, as specifications of typical crosscutting behaviour. Others may be more subtle, making them hard to identify. In either case, it is difficult to analyse requirements to locate all points in the system where the aspects should be applied. To identify aspects early in the software lifecycle developers need support for aspect identification and analysis in requirements documentation. To address this, we have devised the Theme/Doc approach for viewing the relationships between behaviours in a requirements document to identify and isolate aspects in the requirements. This paper describes the approach, and illustrates it with a case study and analysis.