The Use of UML Diagrams to Enhance Dynamic Feature Location Techniques

Unified Modeling Language (UML) is an efficient technique that can be implemented to model and visualize an object-oriented system that suffers from lack or poor documentation. UML diagrams enhance the developers’ understanding the software system to apply software maintenance, software evaluation, or Dynamic Feature Location Techniques (DFLTs). The construction of UML diagrams is based on dynamic or static analysis. Dynamic analysis refers to collecting data when the system executes to generate execution traces, while static analysis refers to collecting the data from the source code. This paper implements UML diagrams in both directions, dynamic and static analysis, to enhance the software programmers applying DFLTs. A use case scenario diagram is used to specify the inputs of the DFLTs based on static analysis. In contrast, class diagrams and object diagrams are used to locate the required software artifacts of source code to construct the exercised feature based on dynamic analysis. Each created use case scenario generates an execution trace. The collected execution trace is analyzed to build class and object diagrams. The implemented case study illustrates the process of the proposed approach and shows that using UML diagrams increases the accuracy of applying DFLTs.