One of the main issues in software maintenance is the time and effort needed to understand software. Software documentation and models are often incomplete, outdated, or non-existent, in part because of the cost and effort involved in creating and continually updating them. In this paper, we describe an innovative technique for automatically extracting and visualizing software behavioral models from execution traces. Lengthy traces are summarized by filtering out low-level software components via algorithms that utilize static and dynamic data. Eight such algorithms are compared in this paper. The traces are visualized using the Use Case Map UCM scenario notation. The resulting UCM diagrams depict the behavioral model of software traces and can be used to document the software. The tool-supported technique is customizable through different filtering algorithms and parameters, enabling the generation of documentation and models at different levels of abstraction.
['Edna Braun', 'Daniel Amyot', 'Timothy C. Lethbridge']
Generating Software Documentation in Use Case Maps from Filtered Execution Traces