Identifying and modeling aspectual scenarios with theme and MATA

Aspect-oriented requirements engineering emerged to deal with crosscutting requirements. There are several aspect-oriented requirements approaches, such as Theme and MATA. Through the Theme approach, one can identify a set of actions associated to verbs present in requirements documentation, which are then analyzed in order to identify crosscutting behaviors, i.e., potential aspectual scenarios. However, the Theme's composition mechanism is not expressive enough even when dealing with analysis models. The MATA approach can overlap this point with its powerful composition mechanisms, based on graph transformations that use UML models, in particular behavioral models. These models express scenarios that constitute a very popular and used technique to specify a system's behavior. Although, MATA is well-succeeded approach to specify aspectual behavior, it does not provide enough mechanisms to identify (aspectual) scenarios. Also, it does not identify negative scenarios, i.e., unexpected situations, making their treatment more manageable using aspect-orientation. All these scenarios could be identified with Theme and refined with MATA. This paper describes an approach that can be seen as a synergy between these two complementary techniques, where identification, modularization, specification and composition of aspectual behavior is realized in a seamless and systematic way.