A survey on early separation of concerns

Aspect oriented software development (AOSD) focuses on the separation of crosscutting concerns. Crosscutting concerns are separable at the requirements phase, design phase, or implementation phase. In this survey, we have classified aspect oriented requirements engineering (AORE) approaches as traditional and non-traditional requirements engineering approaches. The traditional approaches are based on fundamental requirements engineering approaches such as viewpoint oriented, use case/scenario, and goal oriented approaches. Whereas the non-traditional approaches are based on component based engineering, feature driven developments, and domain analysis and engineering. The AORE models have been compared on the basis of systematic activities for separation of concerns: identify, separate, represent, and compose, conflict resolution techniques, and tool support. This survey deals with the open issues put forward by various authors and the observations made by analyses of the AORE models.