Bridging the gap between aspect mining and refactoring

Abstract

Aspect-mining techniques help to identify crosscutting structure that could potentially be modularized through object-oriented (OO) or aspect-oriented refactoring (AO). This paper describes a case study in which we used aspect-mining techniques to identify and refactor crosscutting concerns using aspect-oriented programming. We observed that, in our case, there were many subtle variations in the implementation of the concerns that made them non-trivial to modularize with AO refactoring. In the end, we solved our modularization problem using traditional OO refactoring. We conclude that there exists an important gap between the identification of crosscutting concerns and the technologies available to mitigate the problem.