Concern Driven Software Development

This paper describes the vision of Concern-Driven Development (CDD), a novel software development paradigm that extends model-driven engineering with best practices from reuse, advanced modularization techniques, goal modelling, and software product line research. CDD advocates the use of a three-part interface to describe units of reuse, i.e., concerns. The variation interface describes required design decisions and their impact on high level system qualities, both explicitly expressed using feature models and goal models. The customization interface allows the chosen variation to be adapted to a specific reuse context, while the usage interface defines how a customized concern may eventually be used. When a concern is reused, the modeller first uses the variation interface to select the feature configuration that has the desired impact on stakeholder goals and system qualities, then adapts the concern to the context of the application under development with the help of the customization interface, and finally accesses the concern’s functionality through its usage interface. We argue that, if CDD is successfully adopted on a large scale, it will transform the software engineering discipline by enabling software engineers to specialize to a greater degree and hence align the practice of software engineering closer to what is done in other engineering disciplines.