A problem-, quality-, and aspect-oriented requirements engineering method

Abstract

Requirements engineers not only have to cope with the requirements of various stakeholders for complex software systems, they also have to consider several software qualities (e.g., performance, maintainability, security, and privacy) that the system-to-be shall address. In such a situation, it is challenging for requirements engineers to develop a complete and coherent set of requirements for the system-to-be. Separation of concerns has shown to be one option to handle the complexity of systems. The problem frames approach address this principle by decomposing the problem of building the system-to-be into simpler subproblems. Aspect-orientation aims at separating cross-cutting functionalities into separate functionalities, called aspects. We propose a method called AORE4PF, which shows that aspect-orientation can be integrated into the problem frames approach to increase the separation of concerns and to benefit from several methods that exist on problem frames to develop a complete and coherent set of requirements. We validated our method with a small experiment in the field of crisis management.