Towards a Domain-Oriented Approach for Identifying Aspects in Software Requirements ∗

A major challenge in Aspect-Oriented Software Develop- ment (AOSD) is the discovery and modeling of aspects in the early phases of requirements and analysis. The quality of the discovered early aspects using most exist- ing techniques is as good as the input provided to these techniques. As such, it is difficult to conclude that one approach or another can effectively identify aspects in a given set of requirements. In this paper, a new ap- proach for discovering early aspects in requirements is proposed. The proposed approach complements existing ones by providing a mechanism to iteratively understand and analyze the problem domain in order to discover rel- evant and meaningful candidate aspects. The proposed approach is presented and demonstrated through a case study. Results obtained from the proposed approach are compared to those obtained from the well-known The- me/Doc approach. A tool that supports the proposed approach is implemented and outlined as well.