Recovering Use Case Diagrams from Object Oriented Code: An MDA-based Approach

Modernization of legacy systems requires the existence of technical frameworks for information integration and tool interoperability that allow managing new platform technologies, design techniques and processes. The Model Driven Architecture (MDA), adopted by the Object Management Group (OMG), is aligned with this requirement. Reverse engineering techniques play a crucial role in system modernization. In light of these issues, this paper describes a framework to reverse engineering MDA models from object oriented code. This framework distinguishes three different abstraction levels linked to models, metamodels and formal specifications. This paper shows how to reverse engineering use case diagrams from Java code in the MDA context focusing on transformations at model and metamodel levels.