Reverse engineering of object-oriented code into Umple using an incremental and rule-based approach

Abstract

In this paper we present a novel approach to reverse engineering, in which modeling information such as UML associations, state machines and attributes is incrementally added to code written in Java or C++, while maintaining the system in a textual format. Umple is a textual representation that blends modeling in UML with programming language code. The approach, called umplification, produces a program with behavior identical to the original one, but written in Umple and enhanced with model-level abstractions. As the resulting program is Umple code, our approach eliminates the distinction between code and model. In this paper we discuss the principles of Umple, the umplification approach and a rule-driven tool called the Umplificator, which implements and validates the depicted approach.