Correctness and Completeness of CASE Tools in Reverse EngineeringSource Code into UML Model

Abstract

This paper focuses on Computer-aided Software Engineering (CASE) tools that offer functionality for reverse engineering into Unified Modeling Language (UML) models. Such tools can be used for design recovery or round-trip engineering. For these purposes, the quality and correctness of the reverse engineering capability of these tools is of key importance: Do the tools completely reconstruct the UML diagrams? Are the reverse engineering results correct? What kind of information is presented in the result? Based on these questions, we compare eight UML CASE tools (six commercial tools and two open source tools). We evaluate i) the types of inputs that these tools can handle, ii) the types of diagrams that can be reconstructed, iii) the quality of resulting diagrams.