Mining Aspects from Version History

Aspect mining identifies cross-cutting concerns in a program to help migrating it to an aspect-oriented design. Such concerns may not exist from the beginning, but emerge over time. By analysing where developers add code to a program, our history-based aspect mining (HAM) identifies and ranks cross-cutting concerns. We evaluated the effectiveness of our approach with the history of three open-source projects. HAM scales up to industrial-sized projects: for example, we were able to identify a locking concern that cross-cuts 1 284 methods in Eclipse. Additionally, the precision of HAM increases with project size and history; for Eclipse, it reaches 90% for the top-10 candidates.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: KBSE
• Authors: Silvia Breu, Thomas Zimmermann
• Keywords: Aspect Mining, Cross-cutting Concerns, KBSE 2006, Ranks Cross-cutting Concerns, Software Engineering