Extracting Sequence Diagrams from Execution Traces Using Interactive Visualization

We present a semi-automated approach for the reverse engineering of UML sequence diagrams. Our approach starts with a set of execution traces that are automatically aligned in order to determine the common behavior. Sequence diagrams are then extracted with an interactive visualization, which allows navigating into execution traces and performing extraction operations. We provide a concrete illustration of our approach with a case study, and show in particular that the resulting diagrams are more meaningful and more compact than those extracted by automated approaches.