On the Use of Line Co-change for Identifying Crosscutting Concern Code

Crosscutting concerns are software system features whose implementation is spread across many modules as tangled and scattered code. Identifying such code helps developers to change the concern and/or re-factor it to an aspect. This paper evaluates the suitability of line co-change as a technique for the identification of crosscutting concerns. A line co-change aim at identifying source code lines that have been changed together in a commit transaction performed using a versioning system such as CVS. Promising results have been obtained by evaluating the approach to identify four crosscutting concerns present in an open-source system, JHotDraw. The paper also shows that line co-change can be effectively complemented with clone detection to improve the performance achieved by the separate approaches