Support for Evaluation of Impact Models in Reuse Hierarchies with jUCMNav and TouchCORE

In Concern-Orientation, software systems are built with the help of reusable artifacts called concerns, leading to reuse hierarchies, because higher-level concerns may reuse lower-level concerns. At each level in the reuse hierarchy, a concern uses goal modelling techniques to describe the impact of selected variations from the concern on system qualities such as performance, cost, and user convenience. To reason about trade-offs among system qualities in the whole system, the individual goal models from all levels in the reuse hierarchy have to be considered together. This requires the ability to select variations from different levels in the reuse hierarchy, to connect impacts from lower levels to those at higher levels, and eventually to propagate the evaluation of lower-level goal models to higher-level goal models based on the selection of variations. This tool demonstration reports on such an evaluation mechanism for two tools that provide integrated support for Concern-Orientation: the requirements engineering tool jUCMNav and the software design tool TouchCORE.