Program comprehension through reverse‐engineered sequence diagrams: A systematic review

Abstract

Reverse engineering of sequence diagrams refers to the process of extracting meaningful information about the behavior of software systems in the form of appropriately generated sequence diagrams. This process has become a practical method for retrieving the behavior of software systems, primarily those with inadequate documentation. Various approaches have been proposed in the literature to produce from a given system a series of interactions that can be used for different purposes. The reason for such diversity of approaches is the need to offer sequence diagrams that can cater for the users' specific goals and needs, which can vary widely depending on the users' perception and understandability of visual representations and the target application domains. In this paper, we systematically review existing techniques in this context while focusing on their distinct purposes and potentials of providing more understandable sequence diagrams. In addition, a qualitative evaluation of such techniques is conducted to expose their adequacy and applicability for effective program comprehension. Finally, we list a set of possible extensions to the unified modeling language sequence diagram standard that we anticipate will enhance its versatility and understandability of program control flow, followed by a number of concluding remarks.

Model-Driven Approaches for Reverse Engineering—A Systematic Literature Review

“…The authors highlight open issues and areas that could be used as references for future research. • Ghaleb et al [108] conducted a systematic review to investigate the current reverse engineering approaches for program comprehension that aim to extract program behaviour and present it using sequence diagrams. They assessed these approaches by examining their features, limitations, and operations.…”

Constructing Object Groups Corresponding to Concepts for Recovery of a Summarized Sequence Diagram

“…In step (2), the COIT estimates the importance of each nontemporary object based on the access frequency. Important objects are expected to be heavily accessed from other objects.…”

“…To improve program comprehension, testing, and formal verification, many studies have focused on recovering sequence diagrams [1], [2], [26]. The existing research has stated that because execution traces contain vast amounts of information, reverseengineered sequence diagrams are often afflicted by scalability issues.…”

“…Generating reverse-engineered sequence diagrams from execution traces is a promising approach that can help developers comprehend the behavior of a system. Because an execution trace contains a vast amount of information, the trace information must be summarized or abstracted in order to generate reverse-engineered sequence diagrams of a reasonable size [1], [2].…”