Interactive Exploration of Reverse-Engineered UML Sequence Diagrams Richard Sharp Atanas (Nasko) Rountev Ohio State University
Example of a UML Sequence Diagram start:X p:A m1() m2() m3() create() n:A opt m4() Nasko Rountev VISSOFT'05
Popular UML artifacts for modeling of object interactions 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) Nasko Rountev VISSOFT'05
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 Nasko Rountev VISSOFT'05
Example of a Reverse-Engineered Diagram Nasko Rountev VISSOFT'05
Zooming and Translation Useful, but have serious limitations Nasko Rountev VISSOFT'05
Filter out certain diagram elements 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) Nasko Rountev VISSOFT'05
Filtering of Interaction Fragments Condense alt/opt/loop/break fragments Filter out everything outside of a chosen fragment Nasko Rountev VISSOFT'05
Focusing on a Single Message Nasko Rountev VISSOFT'05
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”) Nasko Rountev VISSOFT'05
Questions? Nasko Rountev VISSOFT'05