Linking goals to aspects

Abstract

In RE models such as goal-oriented models, a complex sys-tem is directly described in terms of its purposes, which makes its functionality much easier to understand and to reason as compared to code-level implementations. Part of the difficulty in maintaining a stronger correspondence between requirements and code is possibly due to the suffi-cient modularization capabilities of traditional architectures where many functionalities do not exist in distinct modular entities. This paper reports on an investigation of how and where some distinct design requirements lead to crosscut-ting concerns when decomposed into code in goal models such as KAOS. We begin by matching our past experience in aspect discovery at the code level with a detailed require-ments modeling of the same architecture in KAOS. The dis-covered patterns are validated in an independent project where the requirements modeling and the aspect identifi-cation are separately conducted. We observe that satisfy-ing OR-decomposed subgoals in the KAOS model typically leads to tangled implementations, and agents responsible for multiple OR-refined goals should be implemented in the aspect-oriented manner.