1. Interactive Exploration of Reverse-Engineered UML Sequence Diagrams
Richard Sharp
Atanas (Nasko) Rountev
Ohio State University

2. Example of a UML Sequence Diagram
start:X
p:A
m1()
m2()
m3()
create()
n:A
opt
m4()
Nasko Rountev VISSOFT'05

3. Popular UML artifacts for modeling of object interactions
UML Sequence Diagrams
Popular UML artifacts for modeling of object interactions
Design-time sequence diagrams
Reverse-engineered sequence diagrams
Based on existing code
Iterative development; design recovery for software maintenance; software testing
Implemented in some commercial UML tools
Together ControlCenter (Borland)
EclipseUML (Omondo)
Nasko Rountev VISSOFT'05

4. Reverse-Engineering Analyses
Dynamic analysis: tracks a set of representative run-time executions
Several research tools
Static analysis: examines only the code
Commercial tools (deficiencies)
Some research work (not comprehensive)
RED tool for Java: PRESTO group at OSU
URL: presto.cse.ohio-state.edu/red
Call chain analysis; control-flow analysis; object naming analysis; visualization and navigation; test coverage measurements
Nasko Rountev VISSOFT'05

5. Example of a Reverse-Engineered Diagram
Nasko Rountev VISSOFT'05

6. Zooming and Translation
Useful, but have serious limitations
Nasko Rountev VISSOFT'05

7. Filter out certain diagram elements
Filtering
Filter out certain diagram elements
Choose starting and ending message
Choose call stack depth
start msg: 172
end msg: 177
depth: 2 (out of 5)
Nasko Rountev VISSOFT'05

8. Filtering of Interaction Fragments
Condense alt/opt/loop/break fragments
Filter out everything outside of a chosen fragment
Nasko Rountev VISSOFT'05

9. Focusing on a Single Message
Nasko Rountev VISSOFT'05

10. Conclusions and Future Work
Interactive, fast-paced exploration
Abstraction is critical
Filtering: by time, by call graph depth, by objects, by interaction fragments
Merging: e.g. combine together a set of related objects into a single object
Computation and re-computation of layout
Techniques from code understanding
Slicing w.r.t. messages, objects, etc.
Refactoring (e.g., “extract sub-diagram”)
Nasko Rountev VISSOFT'05

11. Questions?
Nasko Rountev VISSOFT'05