An Automatic Approach to Generating State Diagram from Contract-Based Class

Abstract

State diagrams are commonly used to describe thedynamic behavior of an individual object. In otherwords, state diagrams can represent sequences ofoperations in classes. In addition, state diagrams arecommonly used for various purposes: test casegeneration, formal verification and code generation.Because state diagrams describe all the possibledynamic behaviors of an object, it is very difficult todraw and understand them. This paper presents anautomated approach to the generation of a statediagram from a contract-based class. That is, a statediagrams are automatically generated by analyzingpre/post conditions of each operation. We alsodeveloped a tool for supporting our approach andapplied the tool to two case studies, MicrowaveOvenand BlankReader. We have found that the proposedtechnique and tool can be useful for constructing statediagrams from contract-based classes.