Mining Eclipse for CrossCutting

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.