A Comparative Study of Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering Approaches

Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering (AORE) aims at improving separation of concerns in the problem space by offering new ways of modularising requirements. Over recent years several AORE approaches have emerged by evolving contemporary requirements approaches such as viewpoints-, scenarios- and goal-based models. Due to the novelty of these techniques, there is a lack of systematic comparative studies analyzing the benefits and drawbacks they can offer to the requirements engineering practice. This paper presents a case study contrasting four eminent AORE approaches in terms of time effectiveness and accuracy of their produced outcome. We address challenges related to the heterogeneous definitions for AORE model concepts as well as the fact that they perform similar general requirements process activities in different ways. In order to address these challenges, we provide a mapping of the AORE approaches onto general RE activities and provide a common naming scheme. The case study results show that specification of aspect compositions in AORE presents an effort bottleneck that has to be carefully weighed against the added benefits of modularity and analysis of systemic properties offered by AORE. Consequently, our study provides an initial yet significant stepping stone towards improving the evaluation of AORE approaches and understanding their contribution to requirements engineering.