A dynamic analysis tool for extracting UML 2 sequence diagrams

There is a wide range of formats and meta-models to represent the information extracted by reverse engineering tools. Currently UML tools with reverse engineering capabilities are not truly interoperable due to differences in the interchange format and cannot extract complete and integrated models. The forthcoming UML 2.0 standard includes a complete meta-model and a well defined interchange format (XMI). There is an available implementation of the meta-model, therefore it is a viable option to use UML 2.0 the modelling format for reverse engineered models. In this paper we propose a technique to automatically extract sequence diagrams from Java programs, compliant to the UML 2.0 specifications. The proposed approach takes advantage of the Eclipse platform and different plug-ins to provide an integrated solution: it relies on a new dynamic analysis technique, based on Aspect Oriented Programming; it recovers the interactions between objects also in presence of reflective calls and polymorphism.