Automated Techniques for Reconstructing and Assessing Correspondence between UML Designs and Implementations

Over the years software systems have grown larger and larger. This trend will continue in the future. For many of these systems, the development does not stop once the system passed the acceptance test. Often, new features are added to existing systems at a later stage. The developers that are responsible for the implementation of new features should under-stand the system before they are able to do their job. System understanding starts at a high level. It is very convenient if not inevitable to use architecture and design models for this. The implementation is far too detailed and voluminous for this purpose. Design models are only useful for understanding however, if the implementation corresponds to these artifacts. It is important for an implementation to correspond to its design. In practice many soft-ware systems deviate from their design. Not all deviations are problematic but many systems deviate too much. In this thesis we will present techniques to assess the correspondence between a design and its implementation. We will present a classification of the differences between design and implementation which we found in several case studies. We will give an indication of the severity of these differences