Reverse Engineering: An Analysis of Dynamic Behavior of Object Oriented Programs by Extracting UML Interaction Diagram

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is widely used as a high level object oriented specification language. UML is a good target language for the reverse engineering models since it is largely used and offers different diagrams. In this paper we present a novel approach in which reverse engineering is performed using UML as the modeling language used to achieve a representation of the implemented system. In this work we have considered java programs. After a brief introduction to the subject we present some analyses which go beyond mere enumeration of methods and fields. We sketch our method of determining association multiplicities, being, in a sense, representative of our approach which produce a simple sequence diagram that can be understood by a programmer when inspecting the source code of a given java programs. To fully understand the behavior of a program, it is crucial to have efficient techniques to reverse dynamic views of the program. In this paper, we focus on the reverse engineering of UML sequence diagram from an object oriented programs and analysis of its dynamic behavior. Keywords-Reverse; Engineering; OOP; UML; Extraction; Instrumentation; Interaction Diagram; Sequence Diagram;