Mining aspectual views using formal concept analysis

Abstract

We report upon an initial experiment using the technique of formal concept analysis for mining aspectual views from the source code. An aspectual view is a set of source code entities, such as class hierarchies, classes and methods that are structurally related in some way, and often crosscut a particular application. Initially, we follow a lightweight approach, where we only consider the names of classes and methods. This simplistic technique already results in the discovery of interesting and meaningful aspectual views, leaving us confident that more complex approaches will perform even better, and merit to be studied in the future.