research-article

Identifying Crosscutting Concerns Using Fan-In Analysis

Authors:

Arie Van Deursen,

Leon MoonenAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM), Volume 17, Issue 1

Article No.: 3, Pages 1 - 37

https://doi.org/10.1145/1314493.1314496

Published: 12 December 2007 Publication History

Abstract

Aspect mining is a reverse engineering process that aims at finding crosscutting concerns in existing systems. This article proposes an aspect mining approach based on determining methods that are called from many different places, and hence have a high fan-in, which can be seen as a symptom of crosscutting functionality. The approach is semiautomatic, and consists of three steps: metric calculation, method filtering, and call site analysis. Carrying out these steps is an interactive process supported by an Eclipse plug-in called FINT. Fan-in analysis has been applied to three open source Java systems, totaling around 200,000 lines of code. The most interesting concerns identified are discussed in detail, which includes several concerns not previously discussed in the aspect-oriented literature. The results show that a significant number of crosscutting concerns can be recognized using fan-in analysis, and each of the three steps can be supported by tools.

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Index Terms

Identifying Crosscutting Concerns Using Fan-In Analysis
1. General and reference
  1. Cross-computing tools and techniques
    1. Metrics
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software post-development issues
      1. Software reverse engineering
  2. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language types
        Object oriented languages

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology

ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology Volume 17, Issue 1

December 2007

100 pages

ISSN:1049-331X

EISSN:1557-7392

DOI:10.1145/1314493

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2007 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 12 December 2007

Accepted: 01 January 2007

Revised: 01 September 2006

Received: 01 July 2005

Published in TOSEM Volume 17, Issue 1

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https://doi.org/10.1002/sys.21686
Hammoudi MMayr-Dorn CMashkoor AEgyed AHung CHong JBechini ASong E(2021)On the effect of incompleteness to check requirement-to-method tracesProceedings of the 36th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing10.1145/3412841.3442021(1465-1474)Online publication date: 22-Mar-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3412841.3442021
Hammoudi MMayr-Dorn CMashkoor AEgyed A(2021)TraceRefiner: An Automated Technique for Refining Coarse-Grained Requirement-to-Class Traces2021 28th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC)10.1109/APSEC53868.2021.00009(12-21)Online publication date: Dec-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/APSEC53868.2021.00009
Czibula ICzibula GMiholca DOnet-Marian Z(2019)An aggregated coupling measure for the analysis of object-oriented software systemsJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2018.10.052148(1-20)Online publication date: Feb-2019
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Marçal IGarcia REler DOlivete Junior CCorreia R(2016)Techniques for the Identification of Crosscutting Concerns: A Systematic Literature ReviewInformation Technolog: New Generations10.1007/978-3-319-32467-8_50(569-579)Online publication date: 29-Mar-2016
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