Reverse engineering of sequence diagrams from framework based web applications

The reverse engineering of Web application is very important, because although their maintenance is frequent, documentation is not always available due to a very short time-to-market. One approach to reverse engineering is the static approach, where source code is analyzed without executing it, resulting in models for all possible inputs. However in static analysis, it is difficult to extract scenarios, which are sequences of accessed Web pages and called methods that achieve a logic. We propose a static analysis method which leverages characteristics of a framework, specifically JBoss Seam Framework. We present a tool that automatically extracts scenarios from a Web application and generates sequence diagrams. Our tool uses framework specific programming model, notation, and definition file to realize page transition analysis, identification of logics and scenarios, and analysis of information kept between multiple pages.