Identifying Crosscutting Concerns Using Partitional Clustering

Abstract:- Aspect mining is a research direction that tries to identify crosscutting concerns in already developed software systems, without using aspect oriented programming. The goal is to identify them and then to refactor them to aspects, to achieve a system that can be easily understood, maintained and modified. In this paper we aim at presenting a partitional clustering algorithm for identifying crosscutting concerns in existing software systems. We experimentally evaluate our algorithm using the open source JHotDraw case study, for three distance functions, providing a comparison of the proposed approach with similar existing approaches. The experimental evaluation conducts us to the best semi-metric distance function to be used in the clustering process. Key–Words: Aspect mining, crosscutting concerns, clustering