Reverse Engineering of Source Code to Sequence Diagram Using Abstract Syntax Tree

Reverse engineering from a source code to a sequence diagram can be very important in the software maintenance process. On the process of reverse engineering, there are a lot of models/approaches that can be used. Extract abstract -present model is one model that can be applied because every stage in the model can represent reverse engineering process. On stages in the model, the extracted source code is converted into a specific structure for easy analyzed in the next process. AST (abstract syntax tree) is one of the structures that can be used in the extraction process. AST is commonly used as a data structure in the compiler. This research focus on the process of reverse engineering of source code to sequence diagrams. AST is used to generate the sequence diagram. We have implemented this idea in an application called REVUML. REVUML has helped in the process of understanding the flow of the source code in a software application. Our research concludes that the structure of AST has been able to assist in the reverse engineering process. Additionally our implementation has shown that AST can reveal sequences of statements in the source code which can help developers in the reverse engineering process.