Overcoming the Prevalent Decomposition in Legacy Code
Jan Hannemann and Gregor Kiczales

In Proceedings for Advanced Separation of Concerns Workshop (Toronto, Canada; 15 May 2001), 2001. Held at the 23rd International Conference on Software Engineering.

Abstract

The potential benefits of advanced separation of concerns (ASOC) techniques are well known and many programmers find the idea of using them appealing. For new software engineering projects these modularization mechanisms offer guidelines of how to structure the system modules. But how can legacy systems profit from them? Code related to concerns not represented in the current modularization has to be carefully identified and extracted while preserving system integrity.

This paper presents a refactoring tool that aids in the extraction of concerns that are ill-represented in the prevalent OOP decomposition. For object-oriented software, the dominant decomposition is into classes (data concerns).