Automated Inference of Pointcuts in Aspect-Oriented Refactoring

Software refactoring is the process of reorganizing the internal structure of code while preserving the external behavior. Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) provides new modularization of software systems by encapsulating crosscutting concerns. Based on these two techniques, aspect-oriented (AO) refactoring restructures crosscutting elements in code. AO refactoring includes two steps: aspect mining (identification of aspect candidates in code) and aspect refactoring (semantic-preserving transformation to migrate the aspect-candidate code to AO code). Aspect refactoring clusters similar join points together for the aspect candidates and encapsulates each cluster with an effective pointcut definition. With the increase in size of the code and crosscutting concerns, it is tedious to manually identify aspects and their corresponding join points, cluster the join points, and infer pointcut expressions. Therefore, there is a need to automate the process of AO refactoring. This paper propose...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ICSE
• Authors: Prasanth Anbalagan, Tao Xie
• Keywords: Aspect Candidates, ICSE 2007, Inferred Pointcut Expressions, Pointcut Expressions, Software Engineering