Mining and classification of diverse crosscutting concerns

Abstract

Crosscutting concerns appear in software system due to the inherent inadequacy of OOP mechanisms to capture them in suitable encapsulating units. This results in scattered and tangled code. One more form of scattering and tangling may result from the absence of OOP abstractions for domain entities of a software. These non-encapsulated domain entities end up scattered and tangled, appearing as crosscutting concerns in code. Aspect mining techniques automate the task of search for possible aspects in the code and falsely attribute all the crosscutting code to aspects even when these scattered concerns point to the absence of a domain abstraction. This paper discusses the application of aspect mining in the presence crosscutting code originating from the absence of aspects and OOP abstractions. A roadmap of a possible solution is provided to distinguish these two types of code scattering.