Finding Core Crosscutting Concerns from Object Oriented Systems Using Information Retrieval

During the software development cycle, software products can undergo many changes in requirements and design. In one of those products, the source code of the system, these changes can impact the original specifications and design, leading to tangled and scattered code that affects the design and maintenance processes. Research efforts have been made to analyze the scattered code for concerns identification and extraction. In object oriented systems, these concerns can be distributed across many classes, leading to the definition and identification of crosscutting concerns. Many methods have been proposed to identify, extract and separate crosscutting concerns. In this paper, a method for crosscutting concerns identification using information retrieval techniques is presented. This work aims to identify the core crosscutting concerns, which are the main tasks a system has to satisfy whose code is scattered over the different classes of the system. Information retrieval provides advantages over common parsing techniques since the code is treated as unstructured text, making the method programming language independent.