Towards Locating a Functional Concern Based on a Program Slicing Technique

A functional concern is often implemented by collaborative software modules. When developers modify or reuse the implementation of a concern, they need to find the module units contributing to the concern and understand how the units collaborate with one another. Although program slicing is an automatic method to extract relationship among program elements in modules, slicing often results in many program elements to understand. This position paper proposes a variant of program slicing that uses heuristics to stop visiting vertices in a program dependence graph. A preliminary case study shows that our method extracts a small subgraph of the usual program slice that seems most applicable to understand the feature. This paper also discusses other possible heuristics towards the automatic extraction of a concern.