REAssistant: a Tool for Identifying Crosscutting Concerns in Textual Requirements (Tool Demonstration)

RAGO ALEJANDRO; MARCOS CLAUDIA; DIAZ PACE JORGE ANDRÉS

Ottawa, ON

Conferencia; ACM/IEEE 18th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS); 2015

ACM/IEEE

Use case modeling is very useful to capture requirements and communicate with the stakeholders. Use cases normally have textual specifications that describe the interactions between the system and external actors. However, since use cases are specified from a functional perspective, concerns that do not fit well this decomposition criterion are kept away from the analysts? eye and might end up intermingled in multiple use cases. These crosscutting concerns (CCCs) are generally relevant for analysis, design and implementation activities and should be dealt with from early stages. Unfortunately, identifying such concerns by hand is a cumbersome and error-prone task, mainly because it requires a semantic interpretation of textual requirements. To ease the analysis of CCCs, we have developed an automated tool called REAssistant that is able to extract semantic information from textual use cases and reveal candidate CCCs, helping analysts to reason about them before making important commitments in the development. Our tool performs a series of advanced NLP analyses based on the UIMA framework. Analysts can define concern-specific queries in the tool to search for CCCs in the requirements via a flexible SQL-like language. In this article, we briefly discuss the technologies behind the tool and explain how an end user can interact with REAssistant to analyze CCCs in use case specifications. A short video explaining the main features of the tool can be found at https://youtu.be/i3kSJil_2eg. The REAssistant tool can be downloaded from https://code.google.com/p/reassistant.