Modularization of quality requirement through aspects from quality scenarios

Abstract

Separation of concerns, if appropriately applied, brings many software engineering benefits such as complexity reduction, reusability, evolvability, and so forth [6]. Long ago, object-oriented programming made more advancements than the former paradigm, structured programming did in terms of separation of concerns. Now, Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) is being accepted as a more advanced solution to the complexity of the software. As an extension to the separation of concerns [4] which is one of the principles in software engineering, separation of crosscutting concerns increases the modularity and as a result, the software quality can be improved. The AOP technique has been more used at the programming level but for systematic application of AOP,, this technique is more and more widely used from the early stages of software development, which is called the ``early aspect``. Quality requirements are typical crosscutting concerns. Many researches have been performed on the modularization of quality requirements especially in the field of requirement engineering. However the module captured in the requirement phase does not match well with the programming construct ``aspect`` in the implementation. In this paper, to overcome the problem in handling aspects in the requirement phase, the aspect concept is applied just after the architecture is set up with the proper quality requirements of the system being developed. With the architecture, quality scenarios and tactics as inputs, we introduce a way to aspectize the tactics. And with examples in various quality attributes, we show the aspect extracted from tactic can be easily connected to the implementation. Because we aspectize quality requirements from the solution arena, quality requirements can be more seamlessly connected to the implementation construct in the name of aspect. With this approach we can aspectize the only aspect that can be realized in the programming construct. This means that ...