The Need for Early Aspects

Early aspects are crosscutting concerns that are identified in the early phases of the software development life cycle. These concerns do not align well with the decomposition criteria of traditional software development paradigms and, therefore, they are difficult to modularise. The result is their specification and implementation scattered along several base modules, producing tangled representations that are difficult to maintain, reuse and evolve. It is now understood that the influence of requirements that cut across other requirements results in incomplete understanding of specified requirements and limits the architectural choices. Thus, a rigorous analysis of crosscutting requirements and their interactions is essential to derive a balanced architecture. Early Aspects offer additional abstraction and composition mechanisms for systematically handling crosscutting requirements. This paper focuses on two pioneering requirements approaches, one based on viewpoints and another based on use-cases.