This month I would like to talk about a paper published on a topic which I personally don't know a great deal about: aspect-oriented software design and development. To some of you this might not be a left-field topic, but unfortunately it is to me. This year at the International Conference on Software Engineering, a workshop was held about aspect-oriented requirements engineering and architecture design. I found a paper presented in this workshop that talks about how tagging can be used to identify and organise concerns during pre-requirements analysis. I thought that this was really related to accessibility. For example, how can we use tagging to highlight accessibility issues at the requirements gathering stage of software design? Would this be useful? Would it be a way to explain to people what kind of accessibility issues can potentially occur based on the requirements?, etc.

Using tagging to identify and organize concerns during pre-requirements analysis

Before requirements analysis takes place in a business context, business analysis is usually performed. Important concerns emerge during this analysis that need to be captured and communicated to requirements engineers. In this paper, we take the position that tagging is a promising approach for identifying and organizing these concerns. The fact that tags can be attached freely to entities, often with multiple tags attached to the same entity and the same tag attached to multiple entities, leads to multi-dimensional structures that are suitable for representing crosscutting concerns and exploring their relationships. The resulting tag structures can be hardened into classifications that capture and communicate important concerns.

Full Paper: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/EA.2009.5071580
Full Proceedings: International Conference on Software Engineering, Proceedings of the 2009 ICSE Workshop on Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering and Architecture Design, 25-30, 2009.

Labels: aspect-oriented, Software engineering, tagging