Mining Eclipse for CrossCutting

Abstract

Software may contain functionality that does not align with
its architecture. Such cross-cutting concerns do not exist
from the beginning but emerge over time. By analysing
where developers add code to a program, our history-based
mining identifies cross-cutting concerns in a two-step process.
First, we mine CVS archives for sets of methods where
a call to a specific single method was added. In a second
step, simple cross-cutting concerns are combined to complex
cross-cutting concerns. To compute these efficiently, we apply
formal concept analysis – an algebraic theory. Unlike approaches
based on static or dynamic analysis, history-based
mining for cross-cutting concerns scales to industrial-sized
projects: For example, we identified a locking concern that
cross-cuts 1284 methods in the open-source project Eclipse.