Discovering and Mining Use Case Model in Reverse Engineering

Use case model is normally used to model software requirement. Reverse engineering of the high-level requirement model from the source code of target system is an important way to promote the program comprehension. In this paper, an approach of discovering and mining the use case model from the source code of object-oriented software is presented. Based on dynamic information, which could be obtained based on instrumentation techniques during the execution of target system, the approach discovers the basic use cases by specifying the beginning methods of method calling sequences of the dynamic information, and then utilizes some rules to mine the relations among basic use cases to build the whole use case model. This approach has been implemented in the XDRE (XiDian reverse engineering) tool. At the end a case study is provided to show the accuracy and usefulness of discovered use case model.