Control Flow Analysis for Reverse Engineering of Sequence Diagrams

Reverse engineering of UML sequence diagrams plays an important role in iterative development and in software maintenance. In static analysis for such reverse engineering, an open question is how to map control-flow graphs to the control-flow primitives of the recently-introduced new generation of UML. Our work presents the first algorithm that solves this problem. We also propose transformations of the reverse-engineered diagrams in order to improve diagram comprehension. Our extensive experiments show that these techniques are efficient and effective. We also describe a test coverage tool based on the sequence diagrams, and discuss its use for the evaluation of a real-world test suite.