Identification of crosscutting concerns at design level

The existence of crosscutting concerns scattered or tangled in the source code complicates the software comprehension, maintenance, evolution and reuse. To improve the modularity of software systems, several approaches aimed to identify the crosscutting concerns to allow their modelling by aspects, in order to take advantage of the benefits of the aspect-oriented paradigm. In the absence of early detection of these crosscutting concerns, they tend to be overlooked and become closely linked, not allowing developers to identify an optimal design. This paper proposes a new approach for crosscutting concerns identification at design level. This latter is materialised by class and sequence diagrams. Sequence diagram carries pertinent information which consists of interactions between objects of the software system, and the chronological order of its tasks.