Automated change propagation from source code to sequence diagrams

Abstract

Sequence diagrams belong to three most frequently used UML diagrams and they are often an integral part of a software design. Designers utilize sequence diagrams to define and visualize designed software’s behavior. But during software development and maintenance, multiple vendor’s changes are implemented into a source code. These changes lead to inconsistencies between a software model and the source code, that are omitted due to lack of time. This paper is focused on problems with automated source code changes propagation into UML sequence diagrams. In the paper, we propose the architecture for synchronization of outdated designers’ sequence diagrams with current software behavior implemented in a source code. The proposed architecture is focused on updating and not on regenerating sequence diagrams, what helps designers to understand modified behavior and changes provided in it. We evaluated the proposed architecture via implemented extension for Eclipse Papyrus, which analyzes differences between sequence diagrams and source code model, and based on developers’ styles, it propagates differences to sequence diagrams.