Requirements Engineering and Aspects

A fundamental problem with requirements engineering (RE) is to validate that a design does satisfy stakeholder requirements. Some requirements can be fulfilled locally by designed modules, where others must be accommodated globally by multiple modules together. These global requirements often crosscut with other local requirements and as such lead to scattered concerns. We explore the possibility of borrowing concepts from aspect-oriented programming (AOP) to tackle these problems in early requirements. In order to validate the design against such early aspects, we propose a framework to trace them into coding and testing aspects. We demonstrate the approach using an open-source e-commerce platform. In the conclusion of this work, we reflect on the lessons learnt from the case study on how to fit RE and AOP research together.