Towards a requirements model for crosscutting concerns

Abstract

Techniques such as use cases, viewpoints and goals help achieve separation of stakeholders concerns but ensuring their consistency with global requirements and constraints is largely unsupported. The work on early aspects, therefore, complements these approaches by providing systematic means for handling such concerns. In this study we focus on a methodology to elicit the crosscutting concerns aspects in the early life phases of software development generally and especially during requirements analysis. Early aspects cannot be localized and tend to be scattered over multiple early life cycle modules. This reduces the modularity of the artifacts and might consequently lead to serious maintenance problems and low degree of reusability. Unfortunately, conventional aspect oriented software development approaches have mainly focused on identifying the aspects at the programming level and less attention has been taken on the impact of crosscutting concerns at the early phases of the software development. © 2007 Asian Network for Scientific Information.