Composition inference for UML class diagrams

Abstract

Knowing which associations are compositions is important in a tool for the reverse engineering of UML class diagrams. Firstly, recovery of composition relationships bridges the gap between design and code. Secondly, since composition relationships explicitly state a requirement that certain representations cannot be exposed, it is important to determine if this requirement is met by component code. Verifying that compositions are implemented properly may prevent serious program flaws due to representation exposure. We propose an implementation-level composition model based on ownership and a novel approach for identifying compositions in Java software. Our approach is based on static ownership inference; it is parameterized by class analysis and is designed to work on incomplete programs. We present empirical results from two instantiation of our approach. For one of these instantiations, on average 40% of the examined fields account for relationships that are identified as compositions. In addition, we present a precision evaluation which shows that the analysis achieves almost perfect precision-that is, it almost never misses composition relationships. The results indicate that precise identification of interclass relationships can be done with a simple and inexpensive analysis, and thus can be easily incorporated in reverse engineering tools that support iterative model-driven development.

Revisiting UML Class Relationship Recovery for Online Education (SEKEEO) (S)

“…Our approach belongs to the third category and is related to [1,2,3]. [1,2] recover UML relationships via checking the following set of properties for objects: multiplicity, exclusivity, and lifetime.…”

“…However, static and dynamic code analyses are used to confirm the properties. [14,3] recover composition relationships via checking the non-accessibility property for objects. To this end, [14,3] check whether a reference to an object is exported by its owner object to a third-party object.…”

“…Amelia generally feels confident to build up a UML diagram only if she can map it to the source-code elements that implement the diagram. In other words, she prefers first writing (a skeleton of) her OO programs and then mapping them to UML diagrams via using her favorite integrated development environment, IDE (e.g., Eclipse 3 ). The program that she has started developing today contains classes that are related to each other in various ways.…”

“…Overall, existing UML recovery tools that use staticcode analysis are not precise enough for online learning purposes. Moreover, the state-of-the-art research approaches that could be adopted for overcoming this limitation are not completely based on static-code analysis (e.g., [1,2]) or they do not satisfy the lifetime and the share-ability object properties required for recovering the UML composition relationship (e.g., [3]).…”

Static analysis for dynamic coupling measures

“…For the experiments we used several Java components from the standard library packages java.text and java.util.zip (used in related analyses [24], [20] and [21]). The components are described briefly in the first three columns of Table 1.…”