A Comparative Analysis of Monitoring Concerns Implementation in Object Oriented Systems

Monitoring concerns are crosscutting concerns that record the behaviour of a software system during development, testing and execution in its own environment. Their implementation using the object oriented paradigm affects an important part of a software system's source code, and, also, the system's maintainability and understandability. Complementary programming paradigms could be used for their design and implementation in order to improve these qualities. In order to refactor the existing implementation first we need to identify the monitoring concerns in the source code. In this article we describe our findings about how monitoring concerns are implemented in object oriented systems, as a starting point in developing an automatic approach for their identification and refactoring. We have analyzed ten open source object oriented software systems developed in Java or C#, and we have performed a comparative analysis of their implementation. We have also identified possible challenges in their automatic identification.