Elicitation of crosscutting aspects at the early phases of software development

Abstract

Techniques such as use cases, viewpoints, goals and architecture trade-off analysis models 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 paper we focus on a methodology to elicit the crosscutting concerns 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. Obviously, the early software development phases actually set the early design decisions and have a large impact on the whole system