Pitfalls in Aspect Mining

The research domain of aspect mining studies the problem of (semi-)automatically identifying potential aspects and crosscutting concernsin a software system, to improve the system´s comprehensibility or enable its migration to an aspect-oriented solution. Unfortunately,most proposed aspect mining techniques have not lived up to their expectations yet. In this paper we provide a list of problems thatmost aspect mining techniques suffer from and identify some of the root causes underlying these problems. Based upon this analysis, weconclude that many of the problems seem to be caused directly or indirectly by the use of inappropriate techniques, a lack of rigourand semantics on what is being mined for and how, and in how the results of the mining process are presented to the user.