Abstract: Now many reverse engineering tools have represented dynamic behaviors of systems using statecharts. But it is very difficult to show them in a flat statechart. An approach of automatically generating hierarchical statecharts based on syntax analysis is proposed in this paper. The main idea of this approach is to cluster XOR states of a flat statechart. Using hierarchical statechats, we can improve the abstract level of statecharts and reduce the amount of states and transitions. Finally, systematic experiment is conducted in the paper in order to verify the correctness and validity of this approach.

Key words: reverse engineering, statecharts, syntax analysis, hierarchical statecharts