An evaluation of clone detection techniques for identifying crosscutting concerns

Abstract

C e n t r u m v o o r W i s k u n d e e n I n f o r m a t i c a Software ENgineeringAn Evaluation of Clone Detection Techniques for Identifying Crosscutting Concerns ABSTRACT Code implementing a crosscutting concern is often spread over many different parts of an application. Identifying such code automatically greatly improves both the maintainability and the evolvability of the application. First of all, it allows a developer to more easily find the places in the code that must be changed when the concern changes, and thus makes such changes less time consuming and less prone to errors. Second, it allows a developer to refactor the code, so that it uses modern and more advanced abstraction mechanisms, thereby restoring its modularity. In this paper, we evaluate the suitability of clone detection as a technique for the identification of crosscutting concerns. To that end, we manually identify four specific concerns in an industrial C application, and analyze to what extent clone detection is capable of finding these concerns. We consider our results as a stepping stone toward an automated "concern miner" based on clone detection. ACM Computing Classification

Identifying aspects using fan-in analysis

“…Two clone detection tools implementing matching on tokens and abstract syntax trees respectively, are evaluated by [3] on an industrial C component. In this component, four dedicated crosscutting concerns were manually identified.…”

Automated Aspect Recommendation through Clustering-Based Fan-in Analysis

“…Another example of an implementation idiom of CCCs is "code duplication". Bruntink et al [3] use clone detection to find aspect candidates in a C-based system ASML. The main limitation of such approaches is that, they only provide individual aspect candidates, without grouping similar elements to groups.…”

“…Functions related to these mechanisms are summarized in Table 1 as listed in [15], where the bolded functions are function-like macros 3 , and the others are inlined functions. The call sites of these function-like macros or inlined functions represent symptoms of the synchronization concern.…”

Mining execution relations for crosscutting concerns

“…Some other approaches rely on clone detection techniques to detect scattered code in the form of crosscutting concerns: Bruntink [21,22,23] [24] analyse version archives for crosscutting concerns. They consider methods to be part of a crosscutting concern when they are changed together in the same transaction and additionally the changes are the same, that is a call to the same method is inserted.…”