A prism for research in software modularization through aspect mining

Abstract

The Prism project develops tools and techniques for discovering non-localized units of modularity in large software systems. A non-localized unit of modularity is manifest by code crosscutting concerns or aspects, such as logging, tracing, synchronization, and persistence. The objective is to be able to analyze legacy code bases containing well over thousands of classes with over millions of lines of code. Aspect discovery is based on aspect mining techniques developed in this research. The successful discovery of aspects will give rise to aspect oriented refactoring possibilities of the software system mined. Prism is developed as plug-in for the Eclipse integrated development environment complementing the AspectJ Development Tools efforts (AJDT) enhancing Eclipse with features for aspect oriented software development. 1