3CI: A Tool for Crosscutting Concern Identification

Certain requirements in requirements document are scattered and tangled. Often software developers neglect these requirements during implementation or repeat the same functionality throughout the codes. These requirements are called crosscutting concerns. Identifying and analyzing these concerns manually is a hassle due to its ambiguous characteristics and massive volume of requirement sources. Aspect-oriented requirements engineering (AORE) supports crosscutting concern identification at various software development phases. However it is crucial at the requirements level; to avoid coupling between requirements, improve traceability among requirements, eases function modularization, reduce software complexity, enhance correctness of the software design, and most importantly it saves the cost. Many techniques have been developed for crosscutting concern identification at the requirements level such as Theme/Doc and Early Aspects. However all of these techniques in the existing studies are only supported by semi-automated tool whereby human intervention is required to achieve the desired results. In this paper, we describe a tool, 3CI that automatically identifies crosscutting concern as well as their crosscutting relationships at the requirement level. The tool utilizes NLP techniques to extract linguistic properties in each unique requirement and exploits these properties to identify crosscutting concerns and its influences in a requirements document. NLP techniques such as part-of-speech analysis, word frequency analysis and dominant verb analysis contribute in the processing of requirements phrases to assist aspects mining.