A Review on Approaches for Identifying Crosscutting Concerns

Brito argued that there are certain properties that the existing software development approaches are not able to modularize. Brito claimed, these properties cut across a large number of artefacts that compose the system. Therefore it is difficult to modularise them in separate modules. These properties are known as cross cutting concerns, which is encapsulated into aspect. Rosenhainer defined aspects as modular artefacts that encapsulate crosscutting concerns. Aspect-oriented requirements engineering shows encouraging results in improving, identification, modularization and composition of crosscutting concerns. For instance, many techniques have been developed for crosscutting concern identification activity. This crucial activity is useful at the requirements level. It avoids coupling between requirements, improves traceability among requirements, eases function modularization, reduces software complexity, enhances the correctness of the software design, and most importantly it saves the cost. Although the research area is still in its infancy, several techniques for crosscutting concern identification have already been developed. However, all of the techniques reviewed are based on semi-automated way. Human intervention is required to achieve the desired results using these techniques. Therefore this paper reviews the existing approaches on its effectiveness to solve this issue.