Combined Approach for Identifying Crosscutting Concerns in an Object Oriented System

Abstract

A concern is an essential guideline and an important principle of software engineering development. It refers to some particular concept, the ability to identify functionalities,or some goal to encapsulate the related parts of a software system. Crosscutting concerns of a program are the concerns that affect or crosscut other concerns. Usually these concerns are very hard to identify and cannot be clearly separated from the rest of the system, as they are mixed with many core concerns from the system leading to code scattering and code tangling. Identifying crosscutting concerns will automatically improve the maintainability, reliability, understandability and the evolution of the software system. Aspect mining is a reverse engineering process that tries to find out crosscutting concerns in an object oriented software system which is already developed. Aspect mining can be done without using Aspect Oriented Software Development(AOSD) paradigm. Our goal is to locate and identify the crosscutting concerns and then to re-factor them into aspects, to obtain a system that can be easily understood, maintained and modified. In our work we have implemented a combined approach for identifying such crosscutting concerns as one approach is not efficient to identify some of the crosscutting concerns. The first technique is the fan-in analysis which is a static approach for identifying scattered codes whereas the second technique is the dynamic analysis approach where execution traces are examined and recurring execution patterns are obtained for identifying the tangled code.