Trade-off analysis between concerns based on aspect-oriented requirements engineering

Abstract

The identification of functional and non-functional concerns is an important activity during requirements analysis. However, there may be conflicts between the identified concerns, and they must be discovered and resolved through trade off analysis. Aspect Oriented Requirements Engineering (AORE) has trade off analysis as one of its goals, but most AORE approaches do not actually offer support for trade off analysis; they focus on describing concerns and generating their composition. This paper proposes an approach for trade off analysis based on AORE using use cases and the Requirements Conflict Matrix (RCM) to represent compositions. RCM shows the positive or negative effect of non functional concerns over use cases and other non functional concerns. Our approach is implemented within a tool called EUCEd (Extended Use Case Editor). We also show the results of evaluating our tool. Copyright © 2012 The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers.