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Analysis of Early Aspects in Requirements Goal
Models: A Concept-Driven Approach
NanNiuandSteveEasterbrook
Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 3G4
{ nn,sme } @cs.toronto.edu
Abstract. Early aspects are stakeholder concerns that crosscut the
problem domain, with the potential for a broad impact on questions
of scoping, prioritization, and architectural design. Analyzing early as-
pects improves early stage decision-making, and helps trace stakeholder
interests throughout the software development life cycle. However, analy-
sis of early aspects is hard because stakeholders are often vague about
the concepts involved, and may use different vocabularies to express
their concerns. In this paper, we present a rigorous approach to con-
ceptual analysis of stakeholder concerns. We make use of the repertory
grid technique to identify terminological interference between stakehold-
ers' descriptions of their goals, and formal concept analysis to uncover
conflicts and trade-offs between these goals. We demonstrate how this
approach can be applied to the goal models commonly used in require-
ments analysis, resulting in the clarification and elaboration of early
aspects. Preliminary qualitative evaluation indicates that the approach
can be readily adopted in existing requirements analysis processes, and
can yield significant insights into crosscutting concerns in the problem
domain.
Keywords: early aspects, goal-oriented requirements analysis, repertory
grid technique, formal concept analysis.
1
Introduction
It has long been recognized that modular systems are easier to produce, maintain,
and evolve [23, 32]. However, complex problems are hard to decompose cleanly,
and any choice of decomposition will inevitably give rise to concerns that crosscut
the resulting structure. Aspect-oriented software development (AOSD) provides
explicit means to model concerns that crosscut multiple system components.
Initially, much of AOSD research was focused on the solution domain: developers
identify and capture aspects mainly in the source code. Recently, a considerable
amount of work on early aspects [8] has been carried out to identify and model
crosscutting properties in the early phases of software development, including
the requirements engineering (RE), domain analysis, and architecture design
activities.
 
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