[Research] SDExplorer: a generic toolkit for smoothly exploring massive-scale sequence diagram

Kaixie Lyu, a master’s student of our laboratory, presented our paper at the 26th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Program Comprehension 2018 (ICPC 2018) held in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Authors: Kaixie Lyu, Kunihiro Noda, and Takashi Kobayashi (TokyoTech)
Title: SDExplorer: a generic toolkit for smoothly exploring massive-scale sequence diagram
Book title: Proc. ICPC 2018, Gothenburg, Sweden, May. 2018
Abstract:

To understand program’s behavior, using reverse-engineered sequence diagram is a valuable technique. In practice, researchers usually record execution traces and generate a sequence diagram according to them.
However, the diagram can be too large to read while treating real-world software due to the massiveness of execution traces.
Several studies on minimizing/compressing sequence diagrams have been proposed; however, the resulting diagram may be either still large or losing important information. Besides, existing tools are highly customized for a certain research purpose. To address these problems, we present a generic toolkit SDExplorer in this paper, which is a flexible and lightweight tool to effectively explore a massive-scale sequence diagram in a highly scalable manner. Additionally, SDExplorer supports popular features of existing tools (i.e. search, filter, grouping, etc.). We believe it is an easy-to-use and promising tool in future research to evaluate and compare the minimizing/compressing techniques in real maintenance tasks.
SDExplorer is available at https://lyukx.github.io/SDExplorer/.