Interactive Scalable Abstraction of Reverse Engineered UML Class Diagrams

A large fraction of the time consumed in software development and maintenance is spent on understanding the software, which indicates it is a critical activity. Software documentation, including software architecture design documentation, is an important aid in software comprehension. However, keeping documentation up to date with evolving source code is often challenging and absence of up date or more comprehensive design-level documentation is not uncommon. As a solution, software architecture design may be recovered using reverse engineering techniques. However, existing reverse engineering methods produce complete design diagrams that include all the details that exist in the source code. The absence of abstraction from implementation details limits the usefulness of existing reverse engineering techniques for understanding software. This paper aims to address this problem by providing a method and tool that interactively allows developers to interactively explore a reverse engineered class diagram at scalable levels of abstraction. To this end, we propose a Software Architecure Abstraction (SAAbs) framework and an automated tool which implements the SAAbs framework. The SAAbs framework applies a machine learning scoring algorithm to produce a class importance ranking for class diagrams, this ranking is the basis for software architecture abstraction and visualization. We validate this framework by validating the SAAbs tool using a semi-structured survey. On average, 30 respondents of this survey rated 5.40 out of 6 points, which indicate that this is a useful tool to assist software developers in understanding a system.

I. Introduction

Software comprehension is one of the most crucial tasks in software maintenance. It consumes a lot of time and effort, especially for large and complex systems. The documentation of software architecture or design is a highly useful artefact for system comprehension. However, it is common that this artefact is not kept up-to-date. Reverse engineering is one of the best options for recovering software architecture design information from the implementation code. Current reverse engineering methods suffer from several problems; one of them is that these methods reverse engineer the complete design, without focusing on what is more important, resulting into diagrams with too much information. Recent Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) tools offer to leave out several properties in a class diagram such as attributes and parameters. However, these tools do not identify which classes are more and which are less important, making it hard for the developer to focus or quickly understand the design at various levels of abstraction. A study by Fernandez-Saez et al.4] found that many subjects in their controlled experiment did not consider reverse engineered diagrams to be helpful in maintaining software, which might be caused by the information overload in these class diagrams.