Supporting architectural design by early aspects identification

In this paper we describe an approach towards the support of architectural design decisions during the early software life cycle. A major issue in these development stages is to find a set of components that have an optimal assignment of responsibilities concerning the fulfillment of stated requirements. Besides functionality responsibilities that can be assigned to single components there exist crosscutting concerns that are spread all over the system. One distinguishing property of crosscutting concerns is that they cannot be localized in a single component. Due to the massive impact on the overall system crosscutting concerns have to be identified as early as possible to find component responsibility assignments that are optimally set up to prevent late, and thus, deep impact changes. For identifying crosscutting concerns already at the requirements level we propose a process that embeds a set of indicators that classify these concerns during use case driven requirements analysis. The concluding architectural evaluation is based on the crosscutting concerns identified. Additionally, we provide heuristics for architectural tactics like component responsibility rearrangements, which lead to recommendations for architecture improvement.