CrossCutting Concerns Identification Supported by Ontologies: A Preliminary Study

Contextualization: CrossCutting Concerns (CCC) or Early-Aspects consist of software concerns that are spread and/or tangled with requirements of other concerns and can be treated by Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering (AORE). Problem: several AORE approaches have been proposed, however, some experimental studies have found problems regarding to the accuracy of these approaches. According to the authors of these studies these problems occur, due to: (i) the lack of knowledge presented by the users of these approaches about the crosscutting nature of CCC; and (ii) the lack of resources to support users of these approaches during the CCC identification. Goal: this work aims to improve the CCC identification accuracy from the support of domain ontologies. Hence, an ontology for the CCC domain was proposed and the Theme/Doc AORE approach was extended aiming to make it suitable for the usage of this ontology. As results, a preliminary experimental study showed a significant increasing of the recall of the extended approach, without negative effects on the precision and execution time of it.