DefinePK

Abstract

Reverse engineering software is the process of moving back of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) phases by analyzing the software system and then representing it at the higher levels of abstractions. Those processes generate high level information from the implementation phase, which can support the software understanding activities by generating several diagrams and specification documents that describe the implemented software. The UML class diagram represents a valuable source of information even after the delivery of the software. The importance of class diagram comes from its closeness to implementation phase. Class diagram extraction can be done either from software’s source code, or from the executable file. This paper proposed approach for extracting a class diagram from the source code. The proposed approach relies on multi-threading technique in the class diagram extraction which is representing the parallel processing. The motivation behind using multi-threading technique is that, it gives an advantage of faster processing to any software because the threads of the program naturally lend themselves to truly concurrent execution. In this paper, a class diagram extraction using multi-threading technique is designed and implemented using the C# programming language. The implemented approach is tested on three case studies that contain several types of entities and relationships between them. Testing results show that the time needed to extract class diagram using multi-threading technique for the tested three cases is less than the time needed in extracting the same class diagram without using multi-threading technique.