A Framework for Aspectual Requirements Validation: An Experimental Study

TL;DR

This paper introduces a validation framework for aspectual requirements in requirements engineering, combining high-level stakeholder validation and low-level checklist validation, proven effective through experimental comparison of two AORE approaches.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel validation framework specifically designed for aspectual requirements and crosscutting concerns in AORE, validated via experimental study.

Findings

The framework effectively validates aspectual requirements.

Experimental results show improved validation accuracy.

The approach is applicable to different AORE methods.

Abstract

Requirements engineering is a discipline of software engineering that is concerned with the identification and handling of user and system requirements. Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering (AORE) extends the existing requirements engineering approaches to cope with the issue of tangling and scattering resulted from crosscutting concerns. Crosscutting concerns are considered as potential aspects and can lead to the phenomena tyranny of the dominant decomposition. Requirements-level aspects are responsible for producing scattered and tangled descriptions of requirements in the requirements document. Validation of requirements artefacts is an essential task in software development. This task ensures that requirements are correct and valid in terms of completeness and consistency, hence, reducing the development cost, maintenance and establish an approximately correct estimate of effort and completion time of the project. In this paper, we present a validation framework to validate the aspectual requirements and the crosscutting relationship of concerns that are resulted from the requirements engineering phase. The proposed framework comprises a high-level and low-level validation to implement on software requirements specification (SRS). The high-level validation validates the concerns with stakeholders, whereas the low-level validation validates the aspectual requirement by requirements engineers and analysts using a checklist. The approach has been evaluated using an experimental study on two AORE approaches. The approaches are viewpoint-based called AORE with ArCaDe and lexical analysis based on Theme/Doc approach. The results obtained from the study demonstrate that the proposed framework is an effective validation model for AORE artefacts.