Comparing Requirement Engineering Approaches for Handling Crosscutting Concerns

A number of requirements engineering (RE) approaches have focused on addressing broadly scoped (non-functional) properties such as security, availability, etc. More recently, several aspect-oriented requirements engineering (AORE) approaches have been proposed to tackle both functional and non-functional requirements of a crosscutting nature. In this paper, we analyse how some well-known RE approaches address crosscutting concerns. We compare these approaches with AORE approaches in order to identify the additional contributions the latter have to offer while at the same time investigating what AORE can learn from traditional RE techniques. We use our comparison to derive a set of challenges to be addressed by AORE techniques. This paper is our position statement, rather then an attempt to precisely evaluate the discussed approaches, for which several large case studies are necessary.