TY - GEN
T1 - Multi-dimensional separation of concerns in requirements engineering
AU - Júnior, João Baptista da Silva Araújo
AU - Rashid, Awais
AU - Moreira, Ana Maria Diniz
PY - 2005
Y1 - 2005
N2 - Existing requirements engineering approaches manage broadly scoped requirements and constraints in a fashion that is largely two-dimensional, where functional requirements serve as the base decomposition with non-functional requirements cutting across them. Therefore, crosscutting functional requirements are not effectively handled. This in turn leads to architecture trade-offs being mainly guided by the non-functional requirements, so that the system quality attributes can be satisfied. In this paper, we propose a uniform treatment of concerns at the requirements engineering level, regardless of their functional, non-functional or crosscutting nature. Our approach is based on the observation that concerns in a system are, in fact, a subset, and concrete realisations, of abstract concerns in a meta concern space. One can delineate requirements according to these abstract concerns to derive more system-specific, concrete concerns. We introduce the notion of a compositional intersection, which allows us to choose appropriate sets of concerns in our multi-dimensional separation as a basis to observe trade-offs among other concerns. This provides a rigorous analysis of requirements-level trade-offs as well as important insights into various architectural choices available to satisfy a particular functional or non-functional concern.
AB - Existing requirements engineering approaches manage broadly scoped requirements and constraints in a fashion that is largely two-dimensional, where functional requirements serve as the base decomposition with non-functional requirements cutting across them. Therefore, crosscutting functional requirements are not effectively handled. This in turn leads to architecture trade-offs being mainly guided by the non-functional requirements, so that the system quality attributes can be satisfied. In this paper, we propose a uniform treatment of concerns at the requirements engineering level, regardless of their functional, non-functional or crosscutting nature. Our approach is based on the observation that concerns in a system are, in fact, a subset, and concrete realisations, of abstract concerns in a meta concern space. One can delineate requirements according to these abstract concerns to derive more system-specific, concrete concerns. We introduce the notion of a compositional intersection, which allows us to choose appropriate sets of concerns in our multi-dimensional separation as a basis to observe trade-offs among other concerns. This provides a rigorous analysis of requirements-level trade-offs as well as important insights into various architectural choices available to satisfy a particular functional or non-functional concern.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=27644431931&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/re.2005.46
DO - 10.1109/re.2005.46
M3 - Conference contribution
SN - 0-7695-2425-7
T3 - Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Requirements Engineering
SP - 285
EP - 296
BT - Proceedings - 13th IEEE International Conference on Requirements Engineering (RE'05)
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
CY - Los Alamitos
T2 - 13th IEEE International Conference on Requirements Engineering, RE 2005
Y2 - 29 August 2005 through 2 September 2005
ER -