Early knowledge organization assisted by aspects

Throughout the lifecycle of software products, changes arise. The repercussions of these changes increase in more advanced stages of the development process. The aspect-oriented proposal is a software development paradigm that provides principles to manage changes. However, the current proposals for the development of the early stages of software do not provide an effective means for functional changes and updates. This paper presents a knowledge modeling methodology in the aspect-oriented context focused on the early stages of the software development. This methodology aims to ease the software evolution through a standardized knowledge representation, a multidimensional organization, and an appropriate advanced separation of concerns. The proposal of a conceptual modeling of early-aspect provides the means for an organization of multidimensional knowledge. The use of ontological techniques under the principles of knowledge-engineering allows specification of early knowledge. This paper presents a case study developed using the methodology and is used as a base to evaluate the methodology, comparing the efficiency in the changes against classic approaches. The results show that it is possible to ease the changes with the proposal presented in this paper. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.