Treffer: Reverse Engineering of UML Specifications from Java Programs

In the present work, we outline a reverse engineering approach for UML specifications in form of class diagrams from Java bytecode. After a brief introduction to the subject we present some analyses which go beyond mere enumeration of methods and fields. A glance onto some related work shows that there seems to be no pat solution for the reverse engineering of the more difficult class diagram elements. We sketch our method of determining association multiplicities, being, in a sense, representative of our approach in general: “intuitive ” analyses, producing results that can be understood by a programmer when inspecting the source code of a given class. Finally, we introduce a tool that implements this work and we apply it onto a small real life example, discussing the results it gave.