Analysis of Early Aspects in Requirements Goal Models: A Concept-Driven Approach - Transactions on Aspect-Oriented Software Development - page 43

requirements
sketches 1

need for additional information (incremental analysis)

requirements
goal model 1

model 1
refinement

reconciled
goal model

1

vocabulary
map on
early
aspects

concept
alignment
via RGT

concept
analysis
via FCA 4

concept
merging

3

2

model 2
refinement requirements

goal model 2

concept lattice
related to
early aspects

1

requirements
sketches 2

facilitate communication
uncover missing information

RGT−based early
aspects capturing

FCA−based early
aspects analysis

organize information
uncover inconsistencies

Note: Dashed parts are annotations, not IDEF0 notations.

Fig. 1. Process overview of the concept-driven framework in IDEF0 notations

A detailed analysis of candidate early aspects in requirements goal models
offers a number of benefits:

- Explicit reasoning about interdependencies between stakeholder goals;
- Improving the modularity of requirements and architectural models;
- Identification of the impact of early aspects on design decisions can improve
the quality of the overall design and implementation;
- Test cases can be derived from early aspects to enhance stakeholder satis-
faction; and
- Tracing stakeholder interests becomes easier since crosscutting concerns are
captured early on.

From the standpoint of aspect-oriented program analysis and evolution, early
aspects provide a baseline to justify and validate code aspects against their
purpose of existence: are they required by specific stakeholders or refactored
based on particular implementations?

1.2 Approach Overview

Our objective is to leverage available and appropriate techniques to form a co-
herent early aspects analysis framework. Although they originated from sepa-
rate disciplines, RGT and FCA share a common underlying structure: a cross-
reference table. This allows these two techniques to be incorporated seamlessly.
This paper presents a concept-driven framework for capturing and analyz-
ing early aspects in goal models based on RGT and FCA. The process overview
of our framework is depicted in Fig.1 using the integration definition for function