An Overview on Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering Area

Background: Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering (AORE) is a research field that aims to provide appropriate strategies for identification, modularization and composition of crosscutting concerns (also called early-aspects). Several AORE approaches have been developed recently, with different features, strengths and limitations. Goals: the aim of this paper is threefold: (i) cataloguing existing AORE approaches based on the activities encompassed by them; (ii) describing what types of techniques have been used by these approaches for "Concern Identification and Classification" - a bottleneck activity; and (iii) identifying which are the most used means of publication of AORE-based studies and how it has been the progress of these studies over the years. Results: we have selected and analyzed 60 (sixty) papers and among them, we identified 38 (thirty-eight) AORE distinct approaches. Some interesting results are: (i) few approaches lead to "Conflict Identification and Resolution", an activity responsible for discovering and treating the mutual influence between different concerns existing in a software; (ii) there is a lack of evaluation studies about already existing AORE approaches; (iii) the most productive research institutions on AORE in the world are located in Lancaster (UK) and Nova Lisboa (Portugal); among other.