Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering for Advanced Separation of Concerns: A Review

Software engineering was introduced to cope with software crisis with two fundamental principles: separation of concerns and modularity. Many programming paradigms have been proposed and used while considering the fundamental principles from the early days. Complex software systems were successfully modularized but complete separation of concerns is still impossible to achieve using today’s most popular programming paradigms such as object-oriented programming. There are some concerns which could not be separated properly in a single class or module due to their highly coupling with other classes or modules’ behaviors. We call such unmodularized concerns as crosscutting concerns and these are responsible for scattering and tangling. Aspects are the natural evolution of the object-oriented paradigm. They provide a solution to some difficulties encountered with object-oriented programming, sometimes scattering and tangling. Hence, Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD) is another step towards achieving improved modularity during software development. It gives emphasis to the separation of crosscutting concerns i.e. advanced separation of concerns and encapsulation of crosscutting concerns in separate modules, known as aspects. It later uses composition mechanism to weave them with other core modules at loading time, compilation time, or run-time. Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering (AORE) is an early phase in AOSD that supports separation of crosscutting concerns at requirements level. It does not replace but rather complements any of the existing requirements methodologies. Over the last few years, several research efforts have been devoted to this area. Several techniques for crosscutting concern identification have already been proposed. In this paper, an attempt is made to review the existing approaches and understand their contribution to requirements engineering.