There has been significant recent interest, within the aspect-oriented software development (AOSD) community, in representing crosscutting concerns at various stages of the software lifecycle. However, most of these efforts have concentrated on the design and implementation phases. The focus of this paper is on representing aspects during requirements modelling. In particular, the issue of how to model aspects as part of scenario-based modelling is addressed. The use of scenarios is common in requirements development and analysis. The authors describe how to represent and compose aspects at the scenario level. Aspectual scenarios are modelled as interaction pattern specifications (IPSs) and are composed with nonaspectual scenarios using instantiation and special composition operators. The composed collection of scenarios can then be translated automatically into a set of state machines using an existing state machine synthesis algorithm. The resulting set of state machines is an executable form of the scenarios and can be used for simulation and analysis of the requirements.
This paper is representative of a large body of work on aspect-oriented modeling that addresses expressive composition mechanisms. This was the first paper to deeply analyze which kind of composition mechanisms are necessary for modeling aspects as scenarios during requirements analysis and early software design. Related work was published at RE04 and MODELS07. The paper won the IEE Software Premium Award. Refinements of the ideas are now implemented in a UML tool for aspect-oriented modeling linked to IBM Rational Software Modeler. Google Scholar shows 38 citations and an additional 40 for the RE04 paper. RAE_import_type : Journal article RAE_uoa_type : Computer Science and Informatics