Mappings for accurately reverse engineering UML class models from C++

Abstract

The paper introduces a number of mapping rules for reverse engineering UML class models from C++ source code. The mappings focus on accurately identifying such elements as relationship types, multiplicities, and aggregation semantics. These mappings are based on domain knowledge of the C++ language and common programming conventions and idioms. An application implementing these heuristics is used to reverse engineer a moderately sized open source, C++ application, and the resultant class model is compared against those produced by other UML reverse engineering applications. A comparison shows that these presented mapping rules effectively produce meaningful, semantically accurate UML models