EA-Miner: Towards Automation in Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering - Transactions on Aspect-Oriented Software Development - page 7

2 EA-Miner and the AORE Process
Recently, several researchers have worked on creating new approaches [15, 25, 26] or
adapting contemporary requirements engineering approaches (e.g., viewpoints [3],
scenarios [21], goals [27]) to what have been called AORE approaches such as
Viewpoint-based AORE [16, 17], Scenario-based AORE [18] and goal-based AORE
[19].
The common goal of all these AORE approaches is to provide an appropriate
separation of concerns at the requirements level modularizing crosscutting properties
in early aspects. While some approaches, often categorized as asymmetric, provide a
clear separation of what are the base and crosscutting abstractions (e.g., in [16, 17]
viewpoints are base abstractions while early aspects 1 are broadly scoped properties,
such as security, availability, response time, that crosscut several viewpoints) other
approaches, categorized as symmetric, give a uniform treatment to the decomposition
units considering everything to be a concern [25].
It is not our intention to get into details of the advantages and disadvantages of
each of the AORE approaches as our goal for EA-Miner is to offer a framework
(tool + guidelines) that can be used with any AORE approach. In Fig. 1 we show a
“general AORE process” which contains a set of activities that are common to most
AORE approaches as described in [16-18].
Fig. 1. General AORE process with detailed adaptation for viewpoint-based AORE
1 Early aspects are also called concerns in this approach.