2007/01/01 by Silvia Breu, Thomas Zimmermann, Breu, Silvia +3
Computer Science · #Advanced Software Engineering Methodologies #Aspect Mining #Aspect-Oriented Programming #CVS #Eclipse #Formal Concept Analysis #Java #Mining Version Archives #Service-Oriented Architecture and Web Services #Software Engineering Research
paper · doi:10.4230/dagsemproc.06302.5
openalex publication_date 2007/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
As programs evolve, newly added functionality sometimes does no longer align with the original design, ending up scattered across the software system. Aspect mining tries to identify such cross-cutting concerns in a program to support maintenance, or as a first step towards an aspect-oriented program. Previous approaches to aspect mining applied static or dynamic program analysis techniques to a single version of a system.We leverage all versions from a system's CVS history to mine aspect candidates with our Eclipse plug-in HAM: when a single CVS commit adds calls to the same (small) set of methods in many unrelated locations, these method calls are likely to be cross-cutting. HAM employs formal concept analysis to identify aspect candidates. Analysing one commit at a time makes the approach scale to industrial-sized programs. In an evaluation we mined cross-cutting concerns from Eclipse 3.2M3 and found that up to 90% of the top-10 aspect candidates are truly cross-cutting concerns.