Validation Framework for Aspectual Requirements Engineering (ValFAR)

Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering (AORE) extends the existing requirements engineering approaches to support the identification and handling of crosscutting concerns. Crosscutting concerns are considered as potential aspects and can lead to the phenomenal "tyranny of the dominant decomposition". Requirements-level aspects are responsible for producing scattered and tangled descriptions of requirements in the requirements document. Requirements validation artifact is an essential task in software development. This task ensures that requirements are correct and valid in terms of completeness and consistency, hence, reducing the development cost, maintenance and establish an approximately correct estimate of effort and completion time of the project. In this paper, we present a validation framework for aspectual requirements that can be used with AORE approaches to facilitate the validation of the resulting crosscutting relationships and aspects. The proposed framework comprises a high-level and low-level validation. The high-level validation is to validate the concerns with stakeholders, whereas the low-level validation validates the aspectual requirement by developers using a checklist. The approach has been evaluated using a case study. The results demonstrate that the proposed framework is feasible and acceptable.