Structural and semantic similarity measurement of UML sequence diagrams

Abstract

Software reuse is one of the main best practices in software development process. Software reuse promotes efficiency and effectiveness. Reusing software project artifacts nowadays not only focus on codes but also other preliminary artifacts, such as requirements specification and design models. In order to reuse models, an effort to retrieve similar models from the project repository is a necessary. This paper introduces a similarity measurement on two UML sequence diagrams. The proposed solution uses a greedy approach to calculate the similarity score of two diagrams using four distinctive similarity metrics derived from elements of sequence diagram. This paper also presents the results of measuring the similarity of sequence diagram-pairs in term of accuracy and time.