An Integrated System to Manage Crosscutting Concerns in Source Code

An Integrated System to Manage Crosscutting Concerns in Source Code

Marin, A.M.

Van Deursen, A. (promotor)

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

2008-01-25

Evolution of software systems accounts for the largest part of their lifecycle and costs. Software engineers therefore, more often than developing new systems, work on complex, existing ones that they have to understand in order to modify them. Understanding such systems requires insight into the various concerns the systems implement, many of which have to be inferred from source code. Particularly challenging for software comprehension, and consequently, software evolution, are those concerns said to be crosscutting: implementation of such concerns lacks modularity and results in scattered and tangled code. The research presented in this thesis proposes an integrated approach to consistent comprehension, identification, documentation, and migration of crosscutting concerns in existing systems. This work is aimed at helping software engineers to more easily understand and manage such concerns in source code. As a final step of our approach, we also experiment with the refactoring of crosscutting concerns to aspect-oriented programming and reflect on the support provided by this new programming technique for improving modularization of concerns.

crosscutting concerns
concern (source code) modeling
source code queries
aspect mining
aspect-oriented programming
refactoring
software evolution
reverse engineering
program comprehension
software engineering

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:f3c0ade4-80bf-4f86-a07a-4f86a29f653d

978-90-9022675-0

Institutional Repository

doctoral thesis

(c) 2007 A.M. Marin