Refactoring of Crosscutting Concerns with Metaphor-Based Heuristics

Abstract

It has been advocated that Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) is an effective technique to improve software maintainability through explicit support for modularising crosscutting concerns. However, in order to take the advantages of AOP, there is a need for supporting the systematic refactoring of crosscutting concerns to aspects. Existing techniques for aspect-oriented refactoring are too fine-grained and do not take the concern structure into consideration. This paper presents two categories towards a metaphorbased classification of crosscutting concerns driven by their manifested shapes through a system's modular structure. The proposed categories provide an intuitive and fundamental terminology for detecting concernoriented design flaws and identifying refactorings in terms of recurring crosscutting structures. On top of this classification, we define a suite of metaphor-based refactorings to guide the "aspectisation" of each concern category. We evaluate our technique by classifying concerns of 23 design patterns and by proposing refactorings to aspectise them according to observations made in previous empirical studies. Based on our experience, we also determine a catalogue of potential additional categories and heuristics for refactoring of crosscutting concerns.

Toward automated refactoring of crosscutting concerns into aspects

“…Later, the described types are manually refactored using different kinds of aspect refactorings. da Silva et al (2009) present an approach of metaphor-driven heuristics and associated refactorings. The refactoring of the code proposed is applicable on two concerns metaphors.…”

Concern-based Refactorings Supported by Class Models to Reengineer Object-Oriented Software into Aspect-Oriented Ones

“…Many works have been proposed for refactoring of OO software to AO ones and the refactorings are only applied at source-code level, from OO to AO (Silva et al, 2009); (Monteiro and Fernandes, 2006); (Hannemann et al, 2005); (Marin et al, 2005); (Iwamoto and Zhao, 2003). Moreover, it was noted a lack of related works related to model-based refactorings.…”

“…There are many studies in the literature that present code-based refactorings (Silva et al, 2009;Monteiro and Fernandes, 2006;Hannemann et al, 2005;Marin et al, 2004;Iwamoto and Zhao, 2003). Our main reasons to create and apply concernbased refactorings supported by models ("modelbased refactorings" in the rest of this paper) are: i) code-level refactorings can be applied to transform OO software in AO ones.…”

Building an expert system to assist system refactorization

“…da Silva et al (2009) propose a high level technique of aspect refactoring based on metaphor-based heuristics. Similar to the techniques enunciate above, the refactorings are used according to the way in which the CCCs are documented.…”