Mining hierarchical UML sequence diagrams from event logs of SOA systems while balancing between abstracted and detailed models

In this paper, we consider an approach to reverse engineering of UML sequence diagrams from event logs of information systems with a service-oriented architecture (SOA). UML sequence diagrams are graphical models quite suitable for representing interactions in heterogeneous component systems; in particular, the latter include increasingly popular SOA-based information systems. The approach deals with execution traces of SOA systems, represented in the form of event logs. Event logs are created by almost all modern information systems primarily for debug purposes. In contrast with conventional reverse engineering techniques that require source code for analysis, our approach for inferring UML sequence diagrams deals only with available logs and some heuristic knowledge. Our method consists of several stages of building UML sequence diagrams according to different perspectives set by the analyst. They include mapping log attributes to diagram elements, thereby determining a level of abstraction, grouping several components of a diagram and building hierarchical diagrams. We propose to group some of diagram components (messages and lifelines) based on regular expressions and build hierarchical diagrams using nested fragments. The approach is evaluated in a software prototype implemented as a Microsoft Visio add-in. The add-in builds a UML sequence diagram from a given event log according to a set of customizable settings.