Automatically Characterising Components with Concerns and Reducing Tangling

Developing large systems exhibiting a high degree of modularity can be a difficult task even for experienced developers. Hindering modularity has several armful effects, such as decreased readability, higher complexity and difficulties to reuse and evolve components. This paper assists developers to achieve modularity of components by providing a way to automatically characterise the concerns within components according to the APIs they are based on. This allows finding the degree of tangling and scattering of concerns over methods and classes. Moreover, by means of the proposed approach developers are given suggestions on how to reduce tangling of some components, thanks to the use of a metric and refactoring techniques. For systems comprising thousand of classes this is a valuable support, since unassisted developers could miss appropriate refactoring opportunities, due to the large number of details they should take into account.