Interactive Exploration of ReverseEngineered UML Sequence Diagrams

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Interactive Exploration of Reverse-Engineered UML
Sequence Diagrams

• Richard Sharp
• Atanas (Nasko) Rountev
• Ohio State University

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Example of a UML Sequence Diagram
startX
pA
m1()
m2()
m3()
create()
nA
m4()
opt
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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)

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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

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Example of a Reverse-Engineered Diagram
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Zooming and Translation

• Useful, but have serious limitations

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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)
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Filtering of Interaction Fragments
Filtering of Interaction Fragments

• Condense alt/opt/loop/break fragments
• Filter out everything outside of a chosen fragment

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Focusing on a Single Message
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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)

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• Questions?