Article

Experiences with the development of a reverse engineering tool for UML sequence diagrams: a case study in modern Java development

Authors:

Matthias Merdes,

Dirk DorschAuthors Info & Claims

PPPJ '06: Proceedings of the 4th international symposium on Principles and practice of programming in Java

Pages 125 - 134

https://doi.org/10.1145/1168054.1168072

Published: 30 August 2006 Publication History

Abstract

The development of a toot for reconstructing UML sequence diagrams from executing Java programs is a challenging task. We implemented such a tool designed to analyze any kind of Java program. Its implementation relies heavily on several advanced features of the Java platform. Although there are a number of research projects in this area usually little information on implementation-related questions or the rationale behind implementation decisions is provided. In this paper we present a thorough study of technological options for the relevant concerns in such a system. The various options are explained and the trade-offs involved are analyzed. We focus on practical aspects of data collection, data representation and meta-model, visualization, editing, and export concerns. Apart from analyzing the available options, we report our own experience in developing a prototype of such a tool in this study. It is of special interest to investigate systematically in what ways the Java platform facilitates (or hinders) the construction of the described reverse engineering tool.

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Cited By

Ghaleb TAljasser KAlturki M(2020)Enhanced Visualization of Method Invocations by Extending Reverse-engineered Sequence Diagrams2020 Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT)10.1109/VISSOFT51673.2020.00010(49-60)Online publication date: Sep-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/VISSOFT51673.2020.00010
Ghaleb TAlturki MAljasser K(2018)Program comprehension through reverse‐engineered sequence diagramsJournal of Software: Evolution and Process10.1002/smr.196530:11Online publication date: 14-Nov-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1002/smr.1965
Alalfi MCordy JDean T(2009)Automated Reverse Engineering of UML Sequence Diagrams for Dynamic Web ApplicationsProceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification, and Validation Workshops10.1109/ICSTW.2009.8(287-294)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2009
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICSTW.2009.8
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Experiences with the development of a reverse engineering tool for UML sequence diagrams: a case study in modern Java development
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software development techniques
      1. Object oriented development
    2. Software post-development issues
      1. Documentation
      2. Software reverse engineering
  2. Software notations and tools
    1. Development frameworks and environments
      1. Object oriented frameworks

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cover image ACM Other conferences

PPPJ '06: Proceedings of the 4th international symposium on Principles and practice of programming in Java

August 2006

230 pages

ISBN:3939352055

DOI:10.1145/1168054

General Chairs:
Ralf Gitzel
University of Mannheim (Germany)
,
Markus Aleksy
University of Mannheim (Germany)
,
Martin Schader
University of Mannheim (Germany)

Copyright © 2006 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 30 August 2006

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Cited By

Ghaleb TAljasser KAlturki M(2020)Enhanced Visualization of Method Invocations by Extending Reverse-engineered Sequence Diagrams2020 Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT)10.1109/VISSOFT51673.2020.00010(49-60)Online publication date: Sep-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/VISSOFT51673.2020.00010
Ghaleb TAlturki MAljasser K(2018)Program comprehension through reverse‐engineered sequence diagramsJournal of Software: Evolution and Process10.1002/smr.196530:11Online publication date: 14-Nov-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1002/smr.1965
Alalfi MCordy JDean T(2009)Automated Reverse Engineering of UML Sequence Diagrams for Dynamic Web ApplicationsProceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification, and Validation Workshops10.1109/ICSTW.2009.8(287-294)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2009
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICSTW.2009.8
Song IKhare RAn YHilsbos M(2008)A Multi-level Methodology for Developing UML Sequence DiagramsProceedings of the 27th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling10.1007/978-3-540-87877-3_10(114-127)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2008
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-540-87877-3_10

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