Requirements engineering techniques that explicitly recognize the importance of clearly identifying and treating crosscutting concerns are called Aspect-oriented Requirements Engineering Approaches (AORE approaches). The emergence of aspect-oriented programming languages has raised the explicit need to identify crosscutting concerns already during the analysis phase. Besides this observation, the modular representation of crosscutting requirements is a first step to ensure traceability of crosscutting concerns through all other artifacts of the software lifecycle (architecture, design and implementation).

Aspect-oriented requirements engineering approaches improve existing requirements engineering approaches through an explicit representation (and modularization) of concerns that were otherwise spread throughout other requirements artifacts (such as use cases, goal models, viewpoints, etc.).

AORE approaches adopt the principle of separation of concerns at the analysis phase (the early separation of concerns). In other words, AORE approaches provide a representation of crosscutting concerns in requirements artifacts.