Application of UML associations and their adornments in design recovery

Abstract

Many CASE tools support reverse engineering and UML. However, it can be observed that, usually, only a subset of the UML notation is supported, namely those parts with a more or less direct code representation. Although a lot of research has been done in this field, the more advanced features of UML notations are not commonly supported in reverse engineering. In this paper, we show approaches to discover patterns in program code that can be represented by means of the advanced notational features of UML class diagrams. We obtain the necessary information by reverse-engineering Java programs with different methods. These have been implemented in a prototype implementation.