Identification of Crosscutting Concerns: A Survey

Modularization of concerns is important for software development. Object oriented programming paradigm provides an ease of modularization of basic concerns. There are some concerns whose implementation cannot be modularized using object oriented paradigm like profiling, logging etc. The implementation of such concerns remains scattered throughout the source code. Such concerns are called crosscutting concerns. Identification of crosscutting concerns plays an important role in aspect mining, defect detection and software maintenance. This paper gives a survey on the techniques used for identifying crosscutting concerns. We have compared eight different techniques. The five of the eight techniques were applied on a tutorial application. The comparison has been done on five parameters like input required, output generated, availability of tools, stage of software development where the technique is applicable,the software on which the technique has already beenapplied.