Mining Eclipse for Cross-Cutting Concerns – MSR 2006

by Silvia Breu, Thomas Zimmermann, Christian Lindig

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.

Download as PDF.

Reference

Silvia Breu, Thomas Zimmermann, Christian Lindig. Mining Eclipse for Cross-Cutting Concerns. In Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2006), Shanghai, China, May 2006, pp. 94-97.

BibTeX Entry

@inproceedings{breu-msr-2006,
    title = "Mining Eclipse for Cross-Cutting Concerns",
    author = "Silvia Breu and Thomas Zimmermann and Christian Lindig",
    year = "2006",
    month = "May",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories",
    editors = "Stephan Diehl and Harald Gall and Martin Pinzger and Ahmed E. Hassan",
    location = "Shanghai, China",
    pages = "94--97",
}