Analysis of Early Aspects in Requirements Goal Models: A Concept-Driven Approach - Transactions on Aspect-Oriented Software Development - page 44

modeling (IDEF0) notations [14]. The indexed boxes in Fig. 1 represent the se-
quence of main actions. Incoming and outgoing arrows model inputs and outputs
of each function, respectively.
The motivation to employ a composite (RGT + FCA) approach is to uti-
lize each technique under proper conditions and for proper tasks. Having roots
in the psychology of personal constructs makes RGT suitable for aligning and
merging stakeholder softgoals (step 2 in Fig. 1). Being a mathematically rigor-
ous technique, FCA provides a basis for conflict detection and trade-off analysis
among various concerns addressed by goal models (step 4 in Fig. 1). Jointly,
these two techniques offer a coherent early aspects framework, while facilitat-
ing communication, organizing information, and uncovering missing information
and inconsistencies (dashed boxes in Fig. 1) [13].
Preliminary work on our use of repertory grid was published in [25, 26, 27].
The emphasis of [25] was to present RGT as a general method to support as-
pectual requirements identification, while the applicability of leveraging RGT
to reconcile softgoals with respect to stakeholder vocabularies was further in-
vestigated in [26, 27]. This paper integrates the new FCA-based early aspects
analysis to provide a more complete treatment of our framework. Throughout
the paper, we demonstrate our approach using a media shop e-business example
adapted from the literature [4, 54], where stakeholder goals and intentions are
modeled using i ∗ notations [53].

This paper has mainly focused on analyzing stakeholder softgoals in the prob-
lem domain. However, we believe that our proposed concept-driven approach
could also facilitate the analysis of aspects in the solution domain or pertinent
to functional requirements, such as buffering and caching. Section 2 describes
goal modeling of the media shop problem domain. A concept-driven approach is
then introduced: Sect. 3 focuses on the RGT-based concept alignment method
and Sect. 4 discusses the FCA-based early aspects analysis method. In Sect. 5,
we report on the results of an initial qualitative study of the utility of our ap-
proach. Section6 reviews related work. Section7 draws some concluding remarks
and outlines future work.

2 Goal Models for Media Shop

Media shop is a store selling different kinds of media items such as books, newspa-
pers, magazines, audio CDs, and videotapes [4]. We assume that a goal-oriented
analysis has been performed to investigate requirements for new on-line services,
using i ∗ as the requirements modeling framework [54]. Early requirements analy-

sis focuses on the intentions of stakeholders. In

i ∗ , stakeholders are represented
as (social) actors who depend on each other for goals to be achieved, tasks to be
performed, and resources to be furnished [53].
The

i ∗ framework emphasizes the analysis of strategic relationships among
organizational actors. A strategic rationale (SR) model exposes the reasoning
within each actor by identifying goals, tasks, softgoals, and their relationships.
The SR models for two media shop stakeholder roles, customer and developer, are