Sort-based Refactoring of Crosscutting Concerns to Aspects

Preprint of paper published in: LATE 2008 - Proceedings of the 2008 AOSD Workshop on Linking Aspect Technology and Evolution, 31 March-4 April 2008; doi:10.1145/1404953.1404957 Crosscutting concerns in object-oriented programming hinder evolution because of their symptoms: tangling and scattering. To benefit from the modularisation capabilities...

An Integrated Crosscutting Concern Migration Strategy and its Application to JHoTDraw

In this paper we propose a systematic strategy for migrating crosscutting concerns in existing object-oriented systems to aspect-based solutions. The proposed strategy consists of four steps: mining, exploration, documentation and refactoring of crosscutting concerns. We discuss in detail a new approach to aspect refactoring that is fully...

Documenting Typical Crosscutting Concerns

Our analysis of crosscutting concerns in real-life software systems (totaling over 500,000 LOC) and in aspect-oriented literature, indicated a number of properties that allow for their decomposition in primitive building blocks which are atomic crosscutting concerns. We identify these blocks as crosscutting concern sorts, and we use them to...

SoQueT: Query-Based Documentation of Crosscutting Concerns

Understanding crosscutting concerns is difficult because their underlying relations remain hidden in a class-based decomposition of a system. Based on an extensive investigation of crosscutting concerns in existing systems and literature, we identified a number of typical implementation idioms and relations that allow us to group such concerns...

Formalizing typical crosscutting concerns

We present a consistent system for referring crosscutting functionality, relating crosscutting concerns to specific implementation idioms, and formalizing their underlying relations through queries. The system is based on generic crosscutting concerns that we organize and describe in a catalog. We have designed and implemented a tool support for...

Applying and combining three different aspect mining techniques

Understanding a software system at source-code level requires understanding the different concerns that it addresses, which in turn requires a way to identify these concerns in the source code. Whereas some concerns are explicitly represented by program entities (like classes, methods and variables) and thus are easy to identify, crosscutting...

A common framework for aspect mining based on crosscutting concern sorts

The increasing number of aspect mining techniques proposed in literature calls for a methodological way of comparing and combining them in order to assess, and improve on, their quality. This paper addresses this situation by proposing a common framework based on crosscutting concern sorts which allows for consistent assessment, comparison and...

Identifying Crosscutting Concerns Using Fan-in Analysis

Aspect mining is a reverse engineering process that aims at finding crosscutting concerns in existing systems. This paper proposes an aspect mining approach based on determining methods that are called from many different places, and hence have a high fan-in, which can be seen as a symptom of crosscutting functionality. The approach is semi...