Automated Support for Dynamic Modeling of Object-Oriented Software

Several object-oriented design methods make use of scenario diagrams (or interaction diagrams), i.e. descriptions of expected interaction between objects during an example run of a system. Such diagrams help the designer to understand the behavior of the participating objects, and eventually to specify their general behavior as state machines or as collections of methods. However, the step from examples to general behavior is difficult and error-prone for a designer. We show how this design gap can be bridged using automated tools. Several techniques are discussed for building automated tool support for the dynamic modeling aspects of object-oriented software development. The discussed techniques include synthesis of state machines and method descriptions on the basis of scenario diagrams, constructing scenario diagrams with the support of existing state machines, visualizing the run-time behavior of an object system, extracting state machines of objects from running systems, and improving the representation of a state machine.