An integrated system to manage crosscutting concerns in source code

Evolution of software systems accounts for the largest part of their lifecycle and costs. Software engineers therefore, more often than developing new systems, work on complex, existing ones that they have to understand in order to modify them. Understanding such systems requires insight into the various concerns the systems implement, many of which have to be inferred from source code. Particularly challenging for software comprehension, and consequently, software evolution, are those concerns said to be crosscutting: implementation of such concerns lacks modularity and results in scattered and tangled code. The research presented in this thesis proposes an integrated approach to consistent comprehension, identification, documentation, and migration of crosscutting concerns in existing systems. This work is aimed at helping software engineers to more easily understand and manage such concerns in source code. As a final step of our approach, we also experiment with the refactoring of crosscutting concerns to aspect-oriented programming and reflect on the support provided by this new programming technique for improving modularization of concerns.

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