Guidelines for Enabling the Extraction of Aspects from Existing Object-Oriented Code.

When extracting crosscutting concerns from object-oriented systems to aspects, it is often needed to transform the code in order to enable the application of aspects. Although not extensively documented in the literature, object-oriented transformations are critical to turn legacy systems ready to aspect-oriented refactoring. For this reason, in this paper, we provide a set of guidelines for maintainers and developers interested in preparing object-oriented systems to the aspect technology. Moreover, we present a tool that can help developers to identify the need of object-oriented transformations. We also evaluate the proposed guidelines and supporting tool through two case studies.