Recovering Views of Inter-System Interaction Behaviors

This paper presents an approach for recovering application-level views of the interaction behaviors between systems that communicate via networks. Rather than illustrating a single behavior, a sequence diagram is constructed that describes the characteristics of multiple combined behaviors. The approach has several properties that make it particularly suitable for analyzing heterogeneous systems. First, since the interactions are retrieved from observing the network communication, our technique can be applied to systems that are implemented in different languages and run on different platforms. Second, it does not require the availability or modification of source code. After the behaviors are extracted, we employ methods to merge multiple observed behaviors to a single sequence diagram that illustrates the overall behavior.The contributions of this paper are a technique for observing and processing the network communication to derive a model of the behavior. Furthermore, it describes a series of model transformations to construct a sequence diagram view of all observed behaviors.