reverse engineering – recent advances and applications - OpenLibra

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Reverse Engineering – Recent Advances and Applications
classes, interfaces, methods, attributes, types as well as their properties (e.g., type and
visibility). Besides, the class diagram shows the interrelationships holding among the classes
(UML, 2010a; UML, 2010b).
Some relevant work for automatic extraction of UML class diagram is present in the
literature (Telea et al, 2009) (Milanova, 2007).
Reverse engineering of UML class diagram annotated in OCL from code is difficult task that
cannot be fully automated. Certain elements in the class diagram carry behavioral
information that cannot be inferred just from the analysis of the code.
A basic algorithm to extract class diagrams can be based on a purely syntactic analysis of the
source code.
Figure 4 shows relationships that can be detected in this way between a Java program and a
UML class diagram.
By analyzing the syntax of the source code, internal class features such as attributes and
methods and their properties (e.g. the parameters of the methods and visibility) can be
recovered. From the source code, associations, generalization, realizations and dependencies
may be inferred too.
Fig. 4. ISM Java constructs versus PSM Java constructs
The main problems of the basic syntactic analysis are linked to the fact that declared types
are an approximation of the classes instantiated due to inheritance and interfaces or, the