Requirement Modeling Method Integrating Problem Frames And Aspect-Oriented Approach

In recent years, with the increase of the scale of software system, each software internal part link perplexing, software development and maintenance become more and more difficult. In order to reduce software development and maintenance difficulty, software engineering community proposed the separation of concerns principle. Subsequently this principle was gradually adopted in the implementation phase of software. Although the separation of concerns provides a way to deal with complex problems, but can not handle some crosscut multiple functional component concerns, such as security concern. Usually these concerns will bring two kinds of bad phenomenon:scattering and tangling. as a consequence, the software is difficult to understand, maintain and reuse. So the aspect-oriented programming was proposed in the software engineering field. The crosscutting concern is encapsulated to a aspect class and then woven into its dynamic crosscutting modules in the aspect-oriented programming. It is in the software implementation phase that the developers identify and handle crosscutting conerns. However, in recent years, aspect-oriented software development community had found that in the early stage of software development, for example in the requirement engineering phase and architecture phase, also exist the crosscutting concerns, so people proposed aspect-oriented requirement engineering. Aspect oriented requirement engineering provides a way to identify and handle the crosscutting concern in the requirement phase. The existing requirement modeling method do not provide an way to treat the crosscutting concerns in general. Aspect-oriented requirement engineering usually are based on the existing requirement modeling methods and increase the function of identification, representation, analysis and composition of crosscutting concerns.Problem frames approach is a widely-accepted approach of software development, aiming at focus user’s attention on the problem of software development rather than premature design solutions. Problem frames approach considers the best way to solve a complicated software problem is to decompose it. Problem frames promote requirement resuability by matching sub problem to a known problem. Although problem frames considers the separation of concerns by problem decompostion and problem struction, problem frame approach does not provide a way to handle some crosscutting properties.These properties affect and constraint a number of subproblems, compromising the requirement reuse and evolution. So it is important for problem frames to research how to handle the crosscuting properties in problem frames approach.Firstly,we analyze and summarize the domestic and outside work about aspect-oriented method and problem frames approach, and introduce the basic concepts and theoretical knowledge of requirement engineering, problem frames and aspect-oriented method. Then we analyze the problem frames approach’s shortcoming in dealing with crosscutting attributes. We put forward an integrated requirement modeling method based on problem frames and aspect-oriented approaches, aimed at dealing with the shortcoming. We introduce the modeling process of the method in detail. In order to verify the effectiveness of the method, we apply the method to a specific case.Then we comparatively analyzed the proposed method and problem frames approach difference in processing requirement change, in order to highlight the proposed method the advantage on processing requirement change. At the same time, we analyzed the method proposed in this paper and other aspect oriented method, in order to find the shortcomings of the method proposed in this paper. Finally, in order to better apply the proposed method to the practical work, we provide a tool support the proposed method in this paper.