2022/01/26 by Breu, Silvia, Zimmermann, Thomas
#Aspect mining #formal concept analysis #mining software repositories
paper · doi:10.4230/dagsemproc.06302.7
As software evolves, new functionality sometimes no longer aligns with the original design, ending up scattered across a program. Aspect mining identifies such cross-cutting concerns in order to then help migrating a system to a better design, maybe even to an aspect-oriented design. We address this task by applying formal concept analysis to a program's history: method calls added across many locations are likely to be cross-cutting. By taking this historical perspective, we introduce a new dimension to aspect mining. As we only analyse changes from one version to the next, the technique is independent of a system's total size and scales up to industrial-sized projects such as Eclipse.