Analysis of Early Aspects in Requirements Goal Models: A Concept-Driven Approach

Early aspects are stakeholder concerns that crosscut the problem domain, with the potential for a broad impact on questions of scoping, prioritization, and architectural design. Analyzing early aspects improves early stage decision-making, and helps trace stakeholder interests throughout the software development life cycle. However, analysis of early aspects is hard because stakeholders are often vague about the concepts involved, and may use different vocabularies to express their concerns. In this paper, we present a rigorous approach to conceptual analysis of stakeholder concerns. We make use of the repertory grid technique to identify terminological interference between stakeholders’ descriptions of their goals, and formal concept analysis to uncover conflicts and trade-offs between these goals. We demonstrate how this approach can be applied to the goal models commonly used in requirements analysis, resulting in the clarification and elaboration of early aspects. Preliminary qualitative evaluation indicates that the approach can be readily adopted in existing requirements analysis processes, and can yield significant insights into crosscutting concerns in the problem domain.