Employing Query Technologies for Crosscutting Concern Comprehension

Common techniques for improving comprehensibility of software systems include concerns modularization and code structuring by applying well-established design patterns. However, non-trivial software systems will unavoidably exhibit concerns whose implementation cannot be mapped onto a single programming module, but will cut across the system’s structure. These crosscutting concerns lead to implementations where multiple responsibilities are tangled inside the same module, making it hard to distinguish them and hampering the comprehensibility of the code. This paper looks into how query technologies can be employed to improve comprehensibility of crosscutting concerns. To this end, we look at a tool-set aimed at supporting the identification and documentation of such concerns in source code. We discuss desired extensions to this tool-set and main challenges to query-based approaches for crosscutting concerns comprehension.