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Author Is there software available to reverse-engineer a finite state
polomora56@gmail.com

2008-02-06, 7:14 pm

Hello,

We have some FSMs that we would like to reverse engineer back to state
transition diagrams.
Is this possible? Can anyone give me some CASE software
recommendations?
I have already looked at Metamill and Umbrello, and neither of these
is able to do this.

Many thanks,
Paul

PS. I don't know if this is the most suitable newsgroup for this
question. Please let me know if there is a more suitable newsgroup.
Phlip

2008-02-07, 4:29 am

polomora56 wrote:

> We have some FSMs that we would like to reverse engineer back to state
> transition diagrams.
> Is this possible? Can anyone give me some CASE software recommendations?
> I have already looked at Metamill and Umbrello, and neither of these is
> able to do this.


An FSM is a transition table, expressed in some substrate language.

If you can program in that language, then you can read the table, and
make a list of each source, destination, and condition. I once did this
(for Rails's acts_as_state plugin), and wrote the list to GraphViz dot
format. This gave us a cute little graph of all the states, with the hops
between them.

> PS. I don't know if this is the most suitable newsgroup for this
> question. Please let me know if there is a more suitable newsgroup.


The only more suitable ones would cover the language these FSMs are
written in, thence a forum for the FSM package itself.

--
Phlip
H. S. Lahman

2008-02-07, 7:15 pm

Responding to Polomora56...

> We have some FSMs that we would like to reverse engineer back to state
> transition diagrams.
> Is this possible? Can anyone give me some CASE software
> recommendations?


I am pretty sure the high-end round-trip tools like Rhapsody and Tau can
do this. In fact, any tool that reverse engineers to UML should be able
to do this since a UML Statechart Diagram /is/ a state transition diagram.


--
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not be cured by a capful of Drano.

H. S. Lahman
hsl@pathfindermda.com
Pathfinder Solutions
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