Hypermodelling for drag and drop concern queries

Abstract

Imagine a developer, who wants to alter the service layer of an application. Even though the principle of separation of concerns is widespread not all elements belonging to the service layer are clearly separated. Thus, a programmer faces the challenge to manually collect all classes that belong to the service layer. In this paper we present the Hypermodelling approach that can be used to query the necessary code fragments that belong to the service layer. We utilize methods and ideas from Data Warehousing to enable this functionality. Slicing and dicing the code in this new way overcomes the common limitation of having only one viewpoint on a program. The service layer can now be uncovered just via a query.