Opening Up Architectures of Software-Intensive Systems: A First Prototype Implementation

Abstract : Although there already exist tools to assist in understanding the behavior of software systems when no complete and consistent design models are available, these tools generate a large volume of information. One approach to deal with this problem is information hiding. This technical memorandum presents a prototype which implements this technique to reverse engineer dynamic models from Java software systems. These models are represented using Unified Modeling Language (UML) sequence diagrams. Such diagrams show the interactions, in terms of messages or information transfers, between the operational nodes of a system, arranged in a time sequence. Information hiding is achieved by reconstructing the sequence diagrams at various levels of abstraction. The interactions between the operational nodes of a system can be displayed at a low level, i.e., object level. However, related operational nodes can also be regrouped into higher level structures, i.e., packages. The proposed approach was implemented in Eclipse, an extensible integrated development environment (IDE). The objective is to complement the behavioral views reverse engineered by the implemented prototype with structure views generated by other tools.