Department of Computer Science, Graduate School of Information Science & Technology, Osaka University
Program Slicing on Java byte-code
for Locating Functional Concerns
Takashi Ishio Ryusuke Niitani
Gail Murphy Katsuro Inoue
Osaka University, Japan
University of British Columbia, Canada
Concern Location
A functional concern is code that helps fulfill a functional requirement.
A software maintenance task usually focuses on a functional concern.
Concern location comprises "Search and Explore."
Search "interesting" methods
grep or other feature location tools
Explore the interaction among the methods
call graph, class hierarchy tree, cross reference
Example: Autosave function in jEdit
jEdit periodically saves the contents of text area.
A user can specify the frequency.
We can easily find
Autosave class,
Buffer.autosave() method and
BufferIORequest.autosave() method.
How the classes and methods are interacting
Exploring Interaction among methods
Important information: control-flow and data-flow.
Which method triggers the autosave function.
Which class has a necessary data (e.g. filename).
How a method saves the contents to a text file.
We have to read following classes:
Autosave, Buffer, BufferIORequest, PerspeciveManager, VFSManager, FileVFS …

Automated Concern Location
We are trying to extract a concern graph from code fragments specified by a developer.
Our approach is based on program slicing.
Our tool is based on Soot, a Java bytecode analysis framework.
Program Slicing
with Heuristics
Slice-to-ConcernGraph
Translation
Code fragments
related to a functionality

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