On the Use of Clone Detection for Identifying Crosscutting Concern Code

  • Authors:

  • Magiel Bruntink;Arie van Deursen;Remco van Engelen;Tom Tourwe

  • Affiliations:

  • IEEE Computer Society;IEEE;-;IEEE

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

In systems developed without aspect-oriented programming, code implementing a crosscutting concern may be spread over many different parts of a system. Identifying such code automatically could be of great help during maintenance of the system. First of all, it allows a developer to more easily find the places in the code that must be changed when the concern changes and, thus, makes such changes less time consuming and less prone to errors. Second, it allows the code to be refactored to an aspect-oriented solution, thereby improving its modularity. In this paper, we evaluate the suitability of clone detection as a technique for the identification of crosscutting concerns. To that end, we manually identify five specific crosscutting concerns in an industrial C system and analyze to what extent clone detection is capable of finding them. We consider our results as a stepping stone toward an automated "aspect miner驴 based on clone detection.