Extracting UML Class Diagrams from Object-Oriented Fortran: ForUML

Abstract

Many scientists who implement computational science and engineering software have adopted the object-oriented (OO) Fortran paradigm. One of the challenges faced by OO Fortran developers is the inability to obtain high level software design descriptions of existing applications. Knowledge of the overall software design is not only valuable in the absence of documentation, it can also serve to assist developers with accomplishing different tasks during the software development process, especially maintenance and refactoring. The software engineering community commonly uses reverse engineering techniques to deal with this challenge. A number of reverse engineering-based tools have been proposed, but few of them can be applied to OO Fortran applications. In this paper, we propose a software tool to extract unified modeling language (UML) class diagrams from Fortran code. The UML class diagram facilitates the developers' ability to examine the entities and their relationships in the software system. The extracted diagrams enhance software maintenance and evolution. The experiments carried out to evaluate the proposed tool show its accuracy and a few of the limitations.

The Scalability-Efficiency/Maintainability-Portability Trade-Off in Simulation Software Engineering: Examples and a Preliminary Systematic Literature Review

“…We found three articles proposing specific methods in the design of a software. Paper [30] proposes a tool for the automatic extraction of a UML class diagram from an objectoriented FORTRAN code. Paper [31] proposes and shows how to define good interfaces for scientific software: "We talk about how those interfaces allow us to generate most code automatically as an expert would manually."…”

“…Only one paper was published as a technical report and, hence, definitely non-refereed. [33], [34], [35], [36], [37], [27], [40], [30], [41], [31], [43], [32], [44] Empirical study without intervention 11 [18], [22], [24], [26], [15], [29], [19], [42], [20], [17], [21] Empirical study with intervention 5 [23], [38], [39], [25], [28] Opinion/philosophical paper 4 [13], [14], [2], [16] We also classified the included article in different types. We show the results in Tab.…”

“…Furthermore, we identified four different classes of contributions in the included articles as shown in Table IV. [18], [26], [16], [29], [19], [17], [21] Describe/analyze trade-off 5 [13], [22], [24], [2], [20] Solutions for single attributes 8 [33], [14], [23], [25], [15], [28], [30], [32] Solutions for trade-off 13 [34], [35], [36], [37], [38], [39], [27], [40], [41], [31], [42], [43], [44] The papers describing or analyzing single attributes concentrate on one or more of the quality attributes. We have seven such papers.…”

Extended ForUML for Automatic Generation of UML Sequence Diagrams from Object-Oriented Fortran

“…(1) xmi:type � "uml:Lifeline" defines lifeline details, where xmi:id � "66rKFjKG" is a lifeline identification number and name � "Person" is a name in the lifeline 6 Scientific Programming…”

“…ese tools support software maintenance processes by reducing the time required to analyze and understand the source code. Our previous work [6] proposed a tool called ForUML, which can transform Fortran-based source code [7] into UML class diagrams. UML is a language for describing and representing the definitions and relationships of a system or program, and it is written in the form of UML diagrams, a format that is well known and widely adopted in the software engineering field.…”