ASPECT MINING USING UML COMMUNICATION DIAGRAM

Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) focuses on precise constructs for modularization of the crosscutting concerns of a program. Crosscutting concerns can be defined as the functionalities that navigate the principal decomposition of software and therefore cannot be assigned to a single modular unit. Aspect mining attempts to find and isolate crosscutting concerns dwelling in legacy systems which in turn help in the adoption of an aspect-oriented design. Functionalities originally scattered across different modules and tangled with each other can be factored out into a distinct, separate unit, called an aspect. Identifying and refactoring the existing system into AOP considerably ease the debugging, testing and maintenance of the large legacy system. The goal of this paper is to find the aspects at the design level using aspect mining techniques for already existing non-aspect applications. The main advantage of this approach is that without understanding the underlying code, we can separate the crosscutting concerns at the architectural level. The novelty in our approach is that we are finding the aspects of an existing system at the architectural level using UML Communication Diagram. Also, the number of nodes in Control Flow Graph (CFG) drawn from the existing Communication diagram is reduced after finding the aspects resulting in the new reduced CFG.