Mining Functional Aspects from Legacy Code

Aspect-oriented software development builds upon object-oriented (OO) development by offering additional abstraction boundaries that help us separate different types of requirements into so-called aspects. Given a legacy OO application, it pays to identify existing aspects to help understand the structure of the application and potentially to extract those aspects into separate software modules that can be maintained and reused individually. We are interested in the extraction and repackaging of functional aspects. We first characterize what we mean by functional aspect, and then explore the properties that such aspects are likely to exhibit in a legacy application that integrate such aspects. Next, we present algorithms for extracting such aspects, and the preliminary results we obtained. We conclude by discussing directions for future research.