Extracting sequence diagram from execution trace of Java program

A software system is changed many times. When we try to change software, we must understand how the software is implemented, especially the functions to be modified. However, such repeated changes may cause situations in which there is no document which reflects the changes and represents the behavior of the software correctly. So, it is important to develop a technique to extract useful information to understand the behavior of the software. We propose a method to extract compact sequence diagrams from dynamic information of object-oriented programs. Our method generates sequence diagrams by compacting a repetition included in the execution trace. This paper presents four compaction rules. The experiment illustrates how our rules effectively compact the execution trace and generate compact sequence diagrams.