Towards an Aspectual Analysis of Legacy Systems

Aspect-Oriented software development provides explicit mechanisms for coping with concerns that crosscut many components and are tangled within individual components. Current AOSD approaches have primarily focused on coping with crosscutting concerns in software systems that are developed from scratch. In this paper we will investigate the applicability of AOSD to the evolution of legacy information systems. Various approaches have been already proposed to enhance LIS, however, these approaches have not explicitly considered crosscutting concerns and/or AOP techniques. We provide a categorization of legacy systems and give some early results in identifying and specifying aspects in legacy systems