Towards a Dynamic Visualization of Complex Reverse-Engineered Object Collaboration

Abstract

UML is useful to model a higher abstraction level concepts of the software in a forward engineering context, but it is still challenging to reverse engineer more complex behavior of realistic object-oriented programs (OOPs) based on such visualization techniques. For example in a sequence diagram, an object appears in quite different ways when it serves as a sender or receiver of some message and as a parameter or return value of another message, and thus compound method invocations such as invocation chains and callbacks cannot be represented directly. In this paper, first, we define a dynamic metrics named alternation complexity that indicates the number of alternations of object roles between sender/receiver and parameter/return value within collaboration. Through experiments with 12 professional programmers, we confirmed that the metrics captures a certain aspect of difficulty in comprehending features. Furthermore, we present a dynamic visualization model to directly represent collaboration where the types of object roles frequently change.