Use Case Redocumentation from GUI Event Traces

Abstract

Use case re-documentation is an important maintenance task. The implemented functionality of an application may not reflect original use cases. This discrepancy can create problems in downstream software activities, such as developing documentation and migrating to platforms adopting a service-oriented architecture (SOA). We present a methodology and a toolkit for re-documenting the use cases of interactive Java swing object-oriented applications. Our method collects execution traces of the application while experienced users interact with it. These traces are clustered according to the similarity of the user interface events, to identify families of task-specific execution scenarios. Finally, the traces in each cluster are aligned to produce usage scenarios and visualized.