Preface

Aspect-oriented requirements-engineering (AORE) approaches aim to facilitate identification and analysis of crosscutting concerns (also termed as aspects) during requirements engineering to understand their potential effects and trade-offs with respect to other stakeholder requirements. Often AORE approaches extend existing requirements-engineering techniques with additional support for identification, modularisation, composition, and analysis of crosscutting concerns. Such support is missing in most contemporary requirements-engineering techniques. For instance, in the classical use cases approach [1], non-functional requirements (NFR) cannot be readily modelled. Although techniques such as goal-based approaches [2, 3] support modularisation and analysis of such NFRs, they lack effective composition mechanisms to reflect and explore the complex dependencies and interactions (between NFRs themselves as well as NFRs and functional concerns) fully. Thus, AORE focuses on providing systematic means for modularisation, composition, and analysis of crosscutting concerns in requirements. In the recent years significant work has been carried out in aspect-oriented requirements engineering. The aim of this book is to serve as a consolidation medium. The message given here is that whatever requirements engineering approach one uses, there will be a problem of treatment of broadly scoped concerns, which repeatedly appear, often have system-wide effects, and interact (e.g. conflict or supplement) with other requirements as well as influence the architectural decisions for the system-to-be. In this book we discuss how such aspects can be identified, represented, composed, and reasoned about, as well as used in specific domains and in industry. Thus, the book does not aim to present or promote a particular aspect-oriented requirements engineering approach but aims to provide an understanding of the aspect-oriented perspective on requirements engineering: what challenges does it tackle that supplement the more established requirements