Better Software - March 2009 - (Page 41) A spect-oriented requirements engineering (AORE) is a recently emerged and promising methodology that can help us improve requirements completeness, maintainability, and cost of development. Despite its benefits, today AORE remains virtually unknown to practitioners in the software industry. This two-part article is intended to fill this gap and explain the AORE concepts and techniques from the practitioner’s perspective. Introduction In part 1 of this article (January/ February 2009), I discuss that the IEEE Std 830 “Recommended Practice for Software Requirements Specifications” defines characteristics of good software requirements where two of those characteristics, completeness and maintainability, prove to be the most challenging to implement on software projects. These challenges stem from the fact that functional features of business applications commonly impact each other such that some features can be scattered across the application and tangled with other features. In the aspect-oriented methodology we call these scattered features crosscutting concerns. Such scattering and tangling effects present challenges for developing complete and maintainable software requirements. AORE specifically addresses these issues and provides effective analysis and specification techniques, shown in figure 1, that do not replace, but complement the existing methodologies. When following AORE in the analysis phase of the requirements process, we logically separate core features from crosscutting concerns. We then analyze the impact of crosscutting concerns on core features and document it in a specific form called a requirements composition table (RCT). Part 1 of this article discussed in detail the steps to create an RCT. An RCT presents a structure of a requirements model that has two dimensions: core features that are structured by application Figure 1: Summary of the AORE techniques www.StickyMinds.com MARCH 2009 BETTER SOFTWARE 41 http://www.StickyMinds.com
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