Aspect-oriented requirements engineering: approaches and techniques

Aspect Oriented Software Development (AOSD) builds on the concept of Separation of Concerns (SoC). It improves software modularity by encapsulating crosscutting concerns into new units called aspects. Aspect Oriented Requirements Engineering (AORE) is an early stage of AOSD. It handles the identification and analysis of crosscutting concerns in requirements. The systematic activities of SoC are identification, separation, representation and composition of concerns. Numerous approaches have been proposed to support the identification and treatment of aspectual requirements. A large body of literature has been found dealing with crosscutting concerns in requirements phase. The aim of this paper is to review and investigate this literature. Few of these approaches provide validation techniques of elicited aspects. The analysis presented in this paper shows that, the validation of aspectual requirements needs more in-depth research. At the time of conducting this research, the existing AORE approaches do not seem to provide a complete solution for aspectual requirements validation problem.