On a top down aspect mining approach for monitoring crosscutting concerns identification

Aspect Mining is a research domain that tries to identify crosscutting concerns implementation in software systems that were developed without using the aspect oriented paradigm. The goal is to refactor the implementation of these concerns in order to use aspects, and gain the benefits introduced by this paradigm. The aspect mining approaches proposed so far are all bottom-up approaches: starting from the source code of a software system they try to discover all the crosscutting concerns that exist in that system. In this paper we present a top-down aspect mining approach that we developed based on the observations gathered after analyzing how monitoring crosscutting concerns are implemented in three open source Java-based software systems. The approach aims to identify only the implementation of logging and tracing monitoring crosscutting concerns in Java-based software systems. We also present and discuss the results obtained by applying this approach on four open source Java software systems.