EA-Miner: a tool for automating aspect-oriented requirements identification

ABSTRACT

Aspect-Oriented requirements engineering helps to achieve early separation of concerns by supporting systematic analysis of broadly-scoped properties such as security, real-time constraints, etc. The early identification and separation of aspects and base abstractions crosscut by them helps to avoid costly refactorings at later stages such as design and code. However, if not handled effectively, the aspect identification task can become a bottleneck requiring a significant effort due to the large amount of, often poorly structured or imprecise, information available to a requirements engineer. In this paper, we describe a tool, EA-Miner, that provides effective automated support for identifying and separating aspectual and non-aspectual concerns as well as their crosscutting relationships at the requirements level. The tool utilises natural language processing techniques to reason about the properties of the concerns and model their structure and relationships.

REFERENCES

• 1: Awais Rashid , Ana Moreira , Joāo Araújo, Modularisation and composition of aspectual requirements, Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Aspect-oriented software development, p.11-20, March 17-21, 2003, Boston, Massachusetts [doi>10.1145/643603.643605]
• 2: Elisa Baniassad , Siobhan Clarke, Theme: An Approach for Aspect-Oriented Analysis and Design, Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Software Engineering, p.158-167, May 23-28, 2004
• 3: J. Whittle and J. Araujo, "Scenario Modeling with Aspects," IEE Proceedings - Software, vol. 151, pp. 157--172, 2004.
• 4: L. Chung, B. A. Nixon, E. Yu, and J. Mylopoulos, Non-Funcitonal Requirements in Software Engineering: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000.
• 5: Pete Sawyer , Paul Rayson , Roger Garside, REVERE: Support for Requirements Synthesis from Documents, Information Systems Frontiers, v.4 n.3, p.343-353, September 2002 [doi>10.1023/A:1019918908208]
• 6: A. Sampaio, N. Loughran, A. Rashid, and P. Rayson, "Mining Aspects in Requirements," presented at Early Aspects 2005: Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering and Architecture Design Workshop (held with AOSD 2005), Chicago, Illinois, USA, 2005.
• 7: V. Ambriola , V. Gervasi, Processing natural language requirements, Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Automated software engineering (formerly: KBSE), p.36, November 02-05, 1997
• 8: Leah Goldin , Daniel M. Berry, AbstFinder, A Prototype Natural Language Text Abstraction Finder for Use in Requirements Elicitation, Automated Software Engineering, v.4 n.4, p.375-412, October 1997 [doi>10.1023/A:1008617922496]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.1 Requirements/Specifications
          Subjects: Tools

Additional Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.7 DOCUMENT AND TEXT PROCESSING
      I.7.5 Document Capture
          Subjects: Document analysis

  K. Computing Milieux
  K.6 MANAGEMENT OF COMPUTING AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS
      K.6.3 Software Management
          Subjects: Software development; Software process

General Terms:
Management

Keywords:
AORE, AOSD, aspect mining and identification, aspect oriented requirements engineering, aspect-oriented software development, automation, concern identification, tool support