Goals and Quality Characteristics: Separating Concerns

Software Requirements Specification (SRS) organization for complex and/or large systems have to do with several not faced challenges until the moment. This organization is a key factor to facilitate the quality assurance of the SRS, regarding features as: correctness, completeness, consistency and modifiability. Organization is also crucial for an effective exploitation of the SRS when elaborating other related or derived artefacts. Although there is a consensus about SRS content, this is not applicable to the organization. Nevertheless, it is evident that depending on the system, their stakeholders and the activities to perform with the SRS, the relevant criteria for SRS organization and presentation can be different. Additionally, another of the main problems to be solved is related to the crosscutting of requirements that produces tangled specifications. This work faces these issues: the organization of SRS by applying Aspect Oriented techniques to properly manage the crosscutting. A Goal Oriented approach for requirements allows us to establish traceability from software goals to specific requirements and from the latter to operationalizations that are realized as software components. In this work, we present an integration of aspect and Goal Oriented approaches, to properly manage the SRS organization and presentation. Furthermore, our proposal uses the standard ISO/IEC 9126 as the starting point to organize goals and requirements. ATRIUM, a methodology to concurrently define requirements and software architecture, provides the setting for our proposal.