Control-flow analysis and representation for aspect-oriented programs

Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) has been proposed as a technique for improving the separation of concerns in software design and implementation. The field of AOP has, so far, focused primarily on problem analysis, language design, and implementation. Even though the importance of program comprehension and software maintenance is known, it has received little attention in the aspect-oriented paradigm. However, as the software systems coded in AOP languages are accumulated, the development of techniques and tools to support program comprehension and software maintenance tasks for aspect-oriented software will become important. In order to understand and maintain aspect-oriented programs, abstract models for representing these programs are needed. In this paper, we present techniques to construct control flow representations for aspect-oriented programs, and discuss some applications of the representations in a program comprehension and maintenance environment.