An Initial Experiment in Reverse Engineering Aspects from Existing Applications

In this paper, we evaluate the benefits of applying aspectoriented software development techniques in the context of a large-scale industrial embedded software system implementing a number of crosscutting concerns. Additionally, we assess the feasibility of automatically extracting these crosscutting concerns from the source code. In order to achieve this, we present an approach for reverse engineering aspects from an ordinary application automatically. This approach incorporates both aconcern verificationand anaspect constructionphase. Our results show that such automated support is feasible, and can lead to significant improvements in source code quality.