This paper proposes a methodology and instrumentation infrastructure toward the reverse engineering of UML (Unified Modeling Language) sequence diagrams from dynamic analysis. One motivation is, of course, to help people understand the behavior of systems with no (complete) documentation. However, such reverse-engineered dynamic models can also be used for quality assurance purposes. They can, for example, be compared with design sequence diagrams and the conformance of the implementation to the design can thus be verified. Furthermore, discrepancies can also suggest failures in meeting the specifications. Due to size constraints, this paper focuses on the distribution aspects of the methodology we propose. We formally define our approach using metamodels and consistency rules. The instrumentation is based on aspect-oriented programming in order to alleviate the effort overhead usually associated with source code instrumentation. A case study is discussed to demonstrate the applicability of the approach on a concrete example

This article addresses the generation of traces to monitor the execution of distributed Java systems, and investigates the use of aspect-oriented programming (AOP) as the instrumentation strategy to get the necessary information at runtime. The overall objective is to gather enough information to help people understand program executions by abstracting out design details related to thread and distributed communications, for instance under the form of UML sequence diagrams. We show how AspectJ, the main Java implementation of AOP, can be used to solve such issues, assuming RMI is the distribution middleware and thread communications employ specific data structures. The most important aspects are discussed and experiments on a case study are reported.