Concern Highlight: A Tool for Concern Exploration and Visualization

Separation of concerns is a powerful principle that can be used to manage the inherent complexity of software. One of the benefits of separation of concerns is an increased understanding of how an application works, which helps during evolution. This benefit comes from the fact that the code belonging to a concern can be seen and reasoned about in isolation from the other concerns with which it is tangled together. In this paper, we present our tool that gives the developer the freedom to annotate existing code based on different concerns. These concerns can be later analyzed or visualized as highlighted text. Although our experiences were based on the special case of high-performance computing programs, we believe that the observations are pertinent to general programming as well