eCITY: A Tool to Track Software Structural Changes Using an Evolving City

A Systematic Mapping on Visual Solutions to Support the Comprehension of Software Architecture Evolution

“…The paper S08 [22] introduces eCITY, a tool that helps software architects and developers to understand the software structure of their system. It allows the track of components' insertion, removal, or modification over system lifespan and provides an interactive visualization that provides an overview of changes.…”

“…eCITY provides views to help the changes over time, like: Timeline View, an administrative view that uses charts and color to emphasize changes between software system versions; and City View, a city layout using animations to represent the transitions of the architecture components and color coding to highlight the evolution and changes of these components, as shown in Figure 4. The eCITY tool works with compiletime information, not providing dynamic views [22]. The eCITY was originally designed as an Eclipse plug-in.…”

“…ARAMIS is a approach for evolution and evaluation of software systems that relies on a infrastructure of run-time monitoring to manage the behavior of the system, in several abstraction levels. In this paper, a prototype of ARAMIS was developed focused only in reconstruc- Figure 4: eCITY: a City View [22] tion of object-level interactions. The prototype uses aspectoriented techniques to extract and gather the run-time architectural information, and the XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) to distribute the gathered information for visualization in real-time, through specialized components, as we can see in Figure 5.…”

“…The evaluation of this process, according to prototype results, shows that ARAMIS can easily be used to demonstrate the behavior of the runtime monitored systems [23]. The paper S10 [24] presents eCITY+, an improved version of eCITY, presented in S08 [22], now combining the stable city layout and the Hierarchical Edge Bundling (HEB), an useful technique to help the implementation of 3D visualization with the use of animation. The eCITY+ is a later version of eCITY tool presented in S08 [22], owning characteristics similar from its predecessor.…”

An Interactive Approach for Inspecting Software System Measurements

“…The key ingredients of our approach are a schema-less data access path to an underlying graph data model, a workflow-based approach for defining metrics, and the ability to visually depict the results of these queries not only in traditional forms (e.g., through tabular views, scatter plots, box plots, histograms, line charts, etc.) but also through modern interactive visualization paradigms (e.g., the city view [7]). The novelty of our approach lies in how we combine the specification and visualization of software measurements through data workflows.…”