Automated aspect recommendation through clustering-based fan-in analysis

Identifying code implementing a crosscutting concern (CCC) automatically can benefit the maintainability and evolvability of the application. Although many approaches have been proposed to identify potential aspects, a lot of manual work is typically required before these candidates can be converted into refactorable aspects. In this paper, we propose a new aspect mining approach, called Clustering-Based Fan-in Analysis (CBFA), to recommend aspect candidates in the form of method clusters, instead of single methods. CBFA uses a new lexical based clustering approach to identify method clusters and rank the clusters using a new ranking metric called cluster fanin. Experiments on Linux and JHotDraw show that CBFA can provide accurate recommendations while improving aspect mining coverage significantly compared to other state-of-the-art mining approaches.