Selective Introduction of Aspects for Program Comprehension

We propose a technique that uses webmining principles on event traces for uncovering important classes in a system’s architecture. These classes can form starting points for the program comprehension process. Furthermore, we argue that these important classes can be used to define pointcuts for the introduction of aspects. Based on a medium-scale case study – Apache Ant – and detailed architectural information from its developers, we show that the important classes found by our technique are prime candidates for the introduction of aspects.