Specifying and identifying widely used crosscutting concerns

To ensure quality of code in large software systems, refactoring operations are the norm. With this goal in mind, it is helpful to direct preventive maintenance of large object-oriented legacy systems towards the more advanced aspect-oriented paradigm. However, manually identifying crosscutting concerns, candidate to be rendered as aspects, in large legacy systems can be an overwhelming task. We propose an approach and provide a tool to identify crosscutting concerns embedded in an object-oriented system. Our approach analyses the implementation of classes and their relationships and looks for specific user-defined schemata. We discuss how to build schemata and provide some general ones, devised in accordance with current aspect-oriented programming practices.