Reverse Engineering UML Sequence Diagrams for Program Comprehension Activities

Abstract

Program comprehension is a required activity for many software development and maintenance tasks. A common means of understanding software is though UML diagrams. UML diagrams model the design and implementation of an application, describing both its structure and behaviour. However with rapid software development life cycles, UML diagrams often become inconsistent with the implementation of an application. This limits their effectiveness in program comprehension activities. This paper presents a program analysis framework to reverse engineer sequence diagrams from application source code. Part of this framework is the ability to filter out irrelevant operations from a sequence diagram in order to simplify the representation of an application. This is achieved by identifying important data, and following its use in the application. The purpose of this framework is to aid in program comprehension activities by providing up to date representations of an application; while also enabling developers to identify the logical operation of a program without interference from irrelevant or supporting operations.