Formalizing typical crosscutting concerns

TL;DR

The paper introduces a formal system and tool support for identifying, organizing, and analyzing crosscutting concerns in source code, enhancing understanding of their implementation and relations within software systems.

Contribution

It formalizes crosscutting concerns with a catalog and query-based approach, and applies this to design patterns and an open-source system for improved code analysis.

Findings

Effective identification of crosscutting concerns in source code

Organized concerns into composite models for better understanding

Applied approach to real-world open-source system JHotDraw

Abstract

We present a consistent system for referring crosscutting functionality, relating crosscutting concerns to specific implementation idioms, and formalizing their underlying relations through queries. The system is based on generic crosscutting concerns that we organize and describe in a catalog. We have designed and implemented a tool support for querying source code for instances of the proposed generic concerns and organizing them in composite concern models. The composite concern model adds a new dimension to the dominant decomposition of the system for describing and making explicit source code relations specific to crosscutting concerns implementations. We use the proposed approach to describe crosscutting concerns in design patterns and apply the tool to an opensource system (JHotDraw).