Understanding crosscutting concerns from various perspectives in software reverse engineering

To solve the identification and comprehension problem of crosscutting concerns in existing legacy software system, a framework of aspects-oriented software reverse engineering was proposed. An approach on re-modularizing traversal features of legacy system was presented, which based on various Unified Modeling Language (UML) diagrams. While modeling crosscutting concerns in UML use case diagrams, the non-functional requirements that affect several use case modules can be enveloped into aspects modules with stereotype mechanism. The recurring message transmission patterns can be re-modularized as aspects in UML sequence diagrams with UML collaborations. Standard UML activity diagram notations were extended and modified by nodes fusion and addition, which support the graphical composition operation between crosscutting behaviors and primary business rules of concurrent system. The case study indicates traversal features of software system can be extracted and re-modularized from various perspectives in aspects-oriented reverse engineering, which improves the comprehensibility and maintainability of legacy system.