Towards new hybrid approach of the reverse engineering of UML sequence diagram

Abstract

To fully understand the behavior of a program, it is important to have automatic techniques that generate UML (Unified Modeling Language) models representing the behavior of the system. Reverse engineering techniques, either through dynamic analysis of the running application or static analysis of the source code, are used to help gain this understanding. Each type of technique has its limitations. The major limitation of dynamic analysis is the need of a system expert user who knows the different behaviors of the system. Static analysis has also limits especially with dynamic links and polymorphism states. In this paper, we propose an approach to automatically extract UML sequence diagrams from object-oriented programming languages. Our approach combines dynamic and static analyses to get the best of both approaches. Our method uses static analysis to identify all different system entries values that can be used to guide the dynamic analysis.