Multi-Dimensional Separation of Concerns in Requirements Engineering

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 nonfunctional 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 and concrete realisations, of abstract concerns in a meta concern space. One can delineate requirements g to these abstract concerns to derive more system-specific, concrete concerns. We introduce the notion of a compositional intersection, which allows us...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: RE
• Authors: Ana Moreira, Awais Rashid, João Araújo
• Keywords: Functional Requirements, RE 2005, Requirements, Requirements Engineering, Software Engineering