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coupling
relation
coupling
relation
s[i]
s[i]
s[j]
s[j]
s[i]
s[i]
indirect
trace relation
indirect
trace relation
direct trace
relation
direct trace
relation
indirect trace
relation
indirect trace
relation
t[k]
t[k]
t[j]
t[j]
t[k]
t[k]
Fig. 14. Direct and indirect trace relations
added some mappings based on indirect trace relationships to the Login concern row
in the dependency matrix shown in Table 13 . Since some use cases are related with the
Login use case by means of an “includes” relationship, such coupling relations imply
that the Login concern is mapped to all these use cases. In Fig. 7 we can see that the
Submit Paper use case is related with the Login use case by means of an “include”
relationship. This relationship implies that the Login concern is mapped onto the Load
Paper use case package. The same is applied to other use cases like Manage
Conference, Assign Paper or View Info Paper. Although some relations are derived
from obvious indirect relations, we mainly focus on this paper on inter-level relations.
In a further study of transitivity between inter- and intra-level relations, we will
consider the combination of transitive closure for both inter-level and intra-level
dependencies.
7 Related Work
Several authors use matrices (design structure matrices, DSM) to analyze modularity
in software design [3]. Lopes and Bajracharya [22] describe a method with clustering
and partitioning of the design structure matrix for improving modularity of object-
oriented designs. However, the design structure matrices represent intra-level
dependencies (as coupling matrices in Sect. 3.1) and not the inter-level dependencies
as in the dependency matrices used for our analysis of crosscutting. In [28], a
relationship matrix (concerns x requirements) very similar to our dependency matrix
is described and used to identify crosscutting concerns. However, there is no
formalized definition of crosscutting.
In project management, an extension to design structure matrices is proposed by
Danilovic and Sandkull [14]. In so-called domain mapping matrices (DMM) they cap-
ture the dynamics of product development. In their terminology the traditional DSMs
support intra-domain analysis, whereas the DMMs support inter-domain analysis. The
purpose of our dependency matrix is similar to these design mapping matrices.
The approach presented in [2] allows the requirements engineer to identify
crosscutting concerns. However, the identification of crosscutting functional concerns
is not yet clear. In [29] the authors have improved this approach by means of a
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