COMAV - A COMPONENT APPLICATION VISUALIZATION TOOL - Use of Reverse Engineering and Interactivity in Visualization for Component Software Comprehension

Abstract

Visualization of software applications plays an important part in the process of comprehending new software systems and is even more important due to its increasing complexity. Component-based development works with complex structure of black-box units and paradoxically there is not much choice in terms of both notation and tooling when one needs to visualize structure of these component-based applications. Reverse engineering is available for only a few component models and the state of the practice in visualization is the simple and static component diagram introduced in UML 2.0. In this paper we present a tool that is generic and it is therefore usable for any component-based application. This tool works with an advanced meta-model (ENT) as an intermediate data model to store all the reverse-engineered information about these applications. This information is then available for further visualization. A new notation based on this meta-model is also suggested in this paper which uses several interactive techniques to enhance the comprehension process.