Evolving Descriptions of Scattered Concerns

When performing a program evolution task, developers often encounter concerns whose implementations are scattered across multiple modules. When the use of aspect-oriented programming mechanisms is either not possible or is too costly, one way to alleviate the difficulties of locating and managing scattered concerns is by capturing knowledge about the code implementing the concerns in a descriptive artifact. Unfortunately, artifacts referring to source code quickly become obsolete as the source code changes. In this paper, we describe how we support the evolution of artifacts that refer to the implementation of concerns in a system by combining the ideas of low-level program abstractions, tolerance to inconsistencies, and specialized tool support for inconsistency management. We show how this approach allows a description of concerns in one version of a code base to be reused on a different version of the same code base.