Exploring How to Develop Transformations and Tools for Automated Umplification

In this research we are exploring how to perform incremental reverse engineering from Java to Umple, a process we call Umplification. Umple is a textual representation that blends modeling in UML with programming language code. It is designed to allow anything from pure textual modeling to almost-pure traditional programming with some modeling concepts added. Umplification involves increasing the proportion of modeling concepts in the code. Novel features of this work are: a) the transformations required are intended to be applied incrementally by a programmer who has a body of legacy code and wants to gradually transform it into Umple, preserving much of the layout, comments and other aspects of the original code if possible, b) the transformations required are at the same time code-to-model, model-to-model and code-to-code. The main contributions will be developing the transformations, developing a usable tool, and demonstrating its effectiveness by means of case studies.