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of the British Computer Society
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Past RESG Event
Early Aspects
Speakers slides
Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering
(Awais Rashid)
Aspects and Consistency Management
(Anthony Finkelstein)
Using Natural Language Semantics for Identification & Composition of Aspectual Requirements
(Ruzanna Chitchyan)
Model Composition in Aspect-Oriented Modelling
(Jon Whittle)
Dates
02 November 2006, 2pm
Venue
C60b/c, InfoLab21, Lancaster University [MAP]
Registration
Free to RESG members. £10.00 for non-members.
To register, contact Pete Sawyer [sawyer@comp.lancs.ac.uk]
In recent years, a number of researchers have started to apply the same kind of thinking developed in aspect-oriented programming (AOP) to the early stages of the software life-cycle, and even to requirements engineering. Where AOP seeks to provide orthogonal modularisations of code that cannot be neatly modularised by (for example) inheritance, early aspects researchers seek to provide a solution for the handling of requirements that cross-cut stakeholder groups, use cases, or other information or architectural structures.
This afternoon event will provide both an introduction to early aspects and snapshots of on-going work in the area by leading researchers in Aspect-Oriented Software Development from the UK, Europe and the US.
Schedule
1.30 - 2.00: Registration
2.00 - 2.40: Awais Rashid. Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering
2.40 - 3.20: Anthony Finkelestein. TBC
3.20 - 3.40: Coffee
3.40 - 4.20: Ana Moreira and Joao Araujo. A Viewpoint-Based Approach for AORE
4.20 - 5.00: Jon Whittle. Composition of State Dependent Use Case Behavioral Models
5.00 - 5.15: Final questions and roundup
Speakers biographies and talk synopses
Awais Rashid is a faculty member in the Computing Department at Lancaster University where he leads research in aspect-oriented (AO) software engineering. His principal research interests are in AO requirements engineering, hybrid AO programming, AO databases and object data management. He has edited/co-edited two special issues of IEE Proceedings Software, including one on AO Requirements Engineering and Architecture Design, and a special section of the BCS Computer Journal on topics in aspect-orientation. He is also the founding co-editor-in-chief of the recently launched journal: Transactions on Aspect-Oriented Software Development (ASOD) by Springer-Verlag. He has been closely involved in various capacities with the AOSD conference since its inception in 2002 (including his role as organising chair in 2004 and as program co-chair in 2006), and many other aspect-orientation related events, including the Early Aspects series of workshops. He is coordinating the European Network of Excellence on AOSD and also leads its geographically distributed Aspect-Oriented Analysis and Design Lab. He has published over 50 papers (a significant number of these on the topic of Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering) and given several invited talks, seminars and tutorials in the area of aspect-oriented development.
URL: http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/computing/aose/.
Synopsis:
Requirements Engineering (RE) approaches must reconcile the need to achieve separation of concerns with the need to analyse constraints that have a broadly-scoped effect on the system. Most RE approaches, e.g. viewpoints and use cases, offer means of partitioning requirements into sets of partial specifications, thus promoting separation of concerns. However, certain requirements, for instance those pertaining to Security, Information Retrieval, etc., crosscut these partial specifications, hence hindering modular and compositional reasoning. This talk will start of with some scenarios of crosscutting in contemporary RE models. This will be followed by an introduction to aspect-oriented software development techniques and their inherent support for dealing with crosscutting concerns. Finally, the talk will discuss how aspect-oriented requirements engineering techniquesexploit this inherent support to improve modular and compositional reasoning about requirements. I will also briefly discuss the role of aspect-oriented requirements engineering within a general RE process.
Anthony Finkelstein
To follow.
Ana Moreira Ana, also the Early Aspects Steering Committee Chair, is an assistant professor at the Department of Informatics at the Universidade Nova Lisboa, Portugal. She holds a PhD in Computer Science in the area of formal methods and object technology. Her main topics of research are aspect-oriented software development, object technology, requirements engineering, and formal description techniques. She is a co-editor of the IEE Software Proceedings special issue on Early Aspects and is a member of the editorial board of the journals "Transactions on AOSD" and "Software and Systems Modeling". She is chair of the Steering Committee for MoDELS 2006 and has been involved, both as organiser and program committee member, in several international conferences, such as ECOOP, CAiSE, UML, MoDELS and AOSD for several years. She was the conference chair for UML 2004 and was workshop chair for ECOOP'99, ECOOP'02 and UML'2003. She co-organised several workshops for ECOOP, OOPSLA, UML and ETAPS. She has co-organised the various editions of the Early Aspects workshop series. For more information please visit http://www-ctp.di.fct.unl.pt/~amm/.
Joao Araujo Joćo Araśjo is an assistant professor at the New University of Lisbon, Portugal. He holds a PhD in Computer Science, from the Lancaster University, United Kingdom, in the area of Software Engineering. Currently his main research interest is in aspect-oriented requirements engineering, having several papers on this topic in international journals, conferences and workshops. He has been one of the organizers of the early aspects series of workshops, held in AOSD, OOPSLA, and SPLC. He is a co-editor of the special issue on Early Aspects for the Transactions on Software Engineering journal and the proceedings of the 8th Workshop on requirements Engineering, held in CAiSE 2005. Additionally, he served on the organization committee of UML'03 as tutorials chair and co-publicity chair of UML'04 and MODELS 2005. For more information please visit http://ctp.di.fct.unl.pt/~ja/.
Synopsis:
Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering (AORE) complements existing Requirements Engineering approaches by offering additional abstraction and composition mechanisms for systematically handling crosscutting, or aspectual, requirements. The influence of such often conflicting aspectual requirements shapes the selection of system requirements and eventually delimits the various architectural choices. Therefore, a rigorous analysis and understanding of aspectual requirements and their interactions are essential to derive a balanced architecture. Ignoring these aspectual requirements results in incomplete understanding of specified requirements and, consequently, poorly informed architectural choices.
This talk discusses how to identify, modularise, compose and analyse trade-offs amongst aspectual requirements with viewpoints-based requirements engineering approaches. It then demonstrates a concrete AORE approach by means of a case study. The talk finishes by discussing how an AORE-based analysis provides invaluable insights into conflicting architectural decisions and choices even before the architecture is derived.
Jon Whittle is an Associate Professor at George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia. He has a PhD and MSc from the University of Edinburgh and a Bachelors from the University of Oxford. Before returning to academia, he was a research lead at NASA Ames Research Center where he developed and applied new techniques in model-driven software development. Jon is an Associate Editor of the Software and Systems Modeling Journal, Chair of the Steering Committee of the International Conference on Model Driven Engineering, Languages and Systems (MoDELS) and PC member for a number of IEEE/ACM conferences. He has conducted research in artificial intelligence, formal methods, requirements engineering, and software modeling. He has taught software engineering across the world, most notably at India's prestigious Indian Institute of Technology.
Synopsis:
Maintaining a clear separation of concerns throughout the software development lifecycle has long been a goal of the software engineering community. Concerns that are separated, however, must be composed at some point. This talk addresses the composition of concerns that have state-dependent behavior. In particular, it presents a technique for keeping state-dependent use cases separate throughout the software modeling process and a method for composing state-dependent use cases on demand. The composition method is based on the graph transformations formalism. Composition based on graph transformation provides a rich yet user-friendly way of composing state dependent use cases that is built on solid foundations. To evaluate our approach, it has been applied to 7 student design solutions. Each solution was originally developed using a traditional use case-driven methodology and was reengineered to evaluate whether our technique could have been applied. The findings are that it is possible to maintain the separation of state-dependent use cases but that expressive model composition methods are necessary for practical design tasks. Graph transformations offer this expressiveness in a way that previous methods do not.
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