Research On Viewpoint-based Aspect-Oriented Requirement Engineering Method

Effective specification of and reasoning about dependencies amongst requirements is a fundamental problem during software systems engineering. Solving this problem depends largely on our requirement engineering methods used to ensure the ability of separation of concerns. Aspect-Oriented Requirement Engineering is a new approach of improving modularity in the requirements which make it possible to begin tackling the problem of tangling, scattering of the requirement as early as in requirement analysis phrase and hence help discover crosscutting concerns in requirement phase and improve the degree of separation of concerns. However, the existing viewpoint-based aspect- oriented requirements engineering methods only focus on non-functional crosscutting concerns and hence crosscutting functional requirements are not effectively handled.First, some existing representative and relatively mature aspect-oriented require- ments engineering methods are comprehensively compared for their achievements and shortcomings. Second, we introduce the thought of multidimensional separation of concerns to view-based aspect-oriented requirements engineering method, and then form a new viewpoint-based aspect-oriented requirements engineering method. The method uses a flexible model in a high-level view of the problem domain decomposition. As to the partial requirements of each viewpoint covered, we decompose them by concern, regardless of their functional or non-functional nature. This makes it possible to project any particular set of requirements on a range of other requirements, hence supporting a multi-dimensional separation. The projections achieve through composition rules employ- ing informal, offen concern-specific, actions and operators. Furthermore, the paper introduces the notion of a compositional intersection, which allows us to choose appropriate set of concerns in our multi-dimensional separation as a basis to observe trade-offs among other concerns. This provides a rigorous analysis of requirements-level trade-offs as well as important insights into various architectural choices available to satisfy a particular functional or non-functional concen.