concerns
Those interests which pertain to the system development, its operation or any other aspects that are critical or otherwise important to one or more stakeholders. Concerns can be logical or physiscal concepts, but they may also include system considerations such as performance, reliability, security, distribution, and evolvability. [IEEE Std 1471-2000]
(From aosd.net) A concern is an area of interest or focus in a system. Concerns are the primary criteria for decomposing software into smaller, more manageable and comprehensible parts that have meaning to a software engineer (see separation of concerns). Examples of concerns include requirements, use cases, features, data structures, quality-of-service issues, variants, intellectual property boundaries, collaborations, patterns and contracts. There are many formulations used to capture concerns as well-identified separate units, aspects are one such mechanism, that are tuned to capturing crosscutting concerns.