Extracting State Models for Black-Box Software Components

We propose a novel black-box approach to reverse engineer the state model of software components. We assume that in different states, a component supports different subsets of its services and that the state of the component changes solely due to invocation of its services. To construct the state model of a component, we track the changes (if any) to its supported services that occur after invoking various services. Case studies carried out by us show that our approach generates state models with sufficient accuracy and completeness for components with services that either require no input data parameters or require parameters with small set of values.