FINT - Tool support for aspect mining

FINT is a tool for identifying code smells of crosscutting implementation of concerns. Crosscutting concerns are particularly hard to recognize and understand in source code, as their implementation is scattered over several modularization units (such as, classes or methods) and tangled with code that implements other concerns. Often, system-wide policies and rules, like exception handling, logging for debugging, or auditing are implemented as crosscutting concerns. To become aware of such concerns when conducting software change tasks on a little known system, and, further on, to understand their implementation and possibly refactor them to aspect-oriented programming, we first need to identify these concerns. Identification of crosscutting concerns is also called aspect mining. Hence, FINT is an aspect mining tool.

The current implementation of FINT includes three source code analysis techniques to identify crosscutting concerns: Fan-in analysis, Grouped calls analysis and Redirections finder. The first two techniques look for concerns that are implemented as scattered method calls, such as logging, exception wrapping, authentication/authorization, etc. Redirection finder is a technique to identify wrapper classes, such as instances of the Decorator pattern.

The tool also supports combination of techniques. Other features of FINT include management and persistence of crosscutting concern seeds and support for reasoning and deciding about seeds reported by the tool.

FINT is implemented as an Eclipse plug-in and can be downloaded below. Help for using and installing the tool is available through Eclipse's Help menu, or here (pdf).

News

A demo of FINT 0.6+ that was given at WCRE 2006

Download FINT 0.6 - see the Download section below!

A demo of FINT at AOSD 2006.

User manual

Here is a recent user manual of FINT in pdf format. A bit older manual, in html, is available here .

Other resources

Publications:

• Identifying Crosscutting Concerns Using Fan-in Analysis, ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM) - Accepted for publication. Earlier version available as Technical report TUD-SERG-2006-013

• A common framework for aspect mining based on crosscutting concern sorts. In Proceedings of the 13th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (WCRE), 2006. (pdf)

• FINT: Tool support for aspect mining. In Proceedings of the 13th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (WCRE), 2006. (pdf)

Experiments and results:

• Fan-in analysis on JHotDraw, PetStore, Tomcat: results
• Fan-in analysis, Grouped calls analysis and Redirection finder on JHotDraw: results

Related

SoQueT is a tool that supports developers in consistently documentating crosscutting concerns in source code.

Contact

Questions, comments, and bug reports are welcome: Marius Marin

Available downloads:

* FINT 0.6 - Fixed small problems in FINT 0.6Beta, Released 10.06.2006 (InstallFINT)

Older releases

• FINT 0.5b Released 01.03.2006 (InstallFINT)

• FINT 0.4b2 Released 01.01.2006 (What's New)

• tud.swerl.plugins.structqueries.fanin_0.3.0.zip: FINT 0.3 - 21 Jul 2005 (FINTKnownIssues)

• tud.swerl.plugins.structqueries.fanin_0.3.0b.zip: FINT 0.3beta

• tud.swerl.plugins.structqueries.fanin_0.2.0.zip: FINT 0.2

• tud.swerl.plugins.structqueries.fanin_0.1.0.zip: FINT 0.1 - 14 Jun 2005