Sequence Diagram Slicing

Software visualization with sequence diagrams is one of the promising techniques aimed at helping developers comprehend the behavior of object-oriented systems effectively. However, it is still difficult to understand this behavior, because the size of automatically generated sequence diagrams tends to be beyond the developer´s capacity. In this paper, we propose a sequence diagram slicing method, which is an extension of our previous method based on a dynamic slicing technique using static information. Our proposed method is capable of accurate slice calculation based on high-precision data dependency and can support various programs, including exceptions and multithreading. In addition, our proposed new tool performs slice calculations on the Eclipse platform and we demonstrate the applicability of this method by applying the tool to two Java programs as case studies. The results confirm the effectiveness of our proposed method for understanding the behavior of object-oriented systems.