CPP2XMI: Reverse Engineering of UML Class, Sequence, and Activity Diagrams from C++ Source Code

In most cases, reverse engineering is used to retrieve missing design documentation from the source code in the form of an abstract (e.g., UML) model. In the context of this work, reverse engineering is used as a part of the verification and validation chain of software systems, where the static structure and the dynamic behavior of a system are derived from the source code and represented in XML Metadata Interchange (XMI) format. The obtained model is further analyzed for such characteristics as soundness and complexity of the system. XMI is a standard that enables us to express objects using Extensible Markup Language (XML). XMI can be used to represent objects from UML model in XML. In this paper, we describe a reverse engineering tool, CPP2XMI, which allows extracting UML class, sequence, and activity diagrams in XMI format from C++ source code, and its position in the toolset for software system analysis