Understanding Software Architectures by Visualization--An Experiment with Graphical Elements

Knodel, Jens; Muthig, Dirk; Naab, Matthias

doi:10.1109/wcre.2006.54

Cited by 10 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…Software understanding is said to constitute between 50 to 90% of the maintenance effort 23, and often requires a good understanding of its architecture 24. Consequently, good architectural documentation is an important asset, helping to minimize the cost of software maintenance 6.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing architectural drift in commercial software development: a case study

Rosik

Gear²,

Buckley

et al. 2010

Softw Pract Exp

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Objectives: Software architecture is perceived as one of the most important artefacts created during a system's design. However, implementations often diverge from their intended architectures: a phenomenon called architectural drift. The objective of this research is to assess the occurrence of architectural drift in the context of de novo software development, to characterize it, and to evaluate whether its detection leads to inconsistency removal. Method: An in vivo, longitudinal case study was performed during the development of a commercial software system, where an approach based on Reflexion Modelling was employed to detect architectural drift. Observation and think‐aloud data, captured during the system's development, were assessed for the presence and types of architectural drift. When divergences were identified, the data were further analysed to see if identification led to the removal of these divergences. Results: The analysed system diverged from the intended architecture, during the initial implementation of the system. Surprisingly however, this work showed that Reflexion Modelling served to conceal some of the inconsistencies, a finding that directly contradicts the high regard that this technique enjoys as an architectural evaluation tool. Finally, the analysis illustrated that detection of inconsistencies was insufficient to prompt their removal, in the small, informal team context studied. Conclusions: Although the utility of the approach for detecting inconsistencies was demonstrated in most cases, it also served to hide several inconsistencies and did not act as a trigger for their removal. Hence additional efforts must be taken to lessen architectural drift and several improvements in this regard are suggested. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing architectural drift in commercial software development: a case study

Rosik

Gear²,

Buckley

et al. 2010

Softw Pract Exp

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“…All materials (questionnaires, tasks, etc.) have been published in (Naab et al 2005) and a first evaluation of the experiment was published in (Knodel et al 2006c). …”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

An experiment on the role of graphical elements in architecture visualization

2008

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The evolution and maintenance of large-scale software systems requires first an understanding of its architecture before delving into lower-level details. Tools facilitating the architecture comprehension tasks by visualization provide different sets of configurable, graphical elements to present information to their users. We conducted a controlled experiment that exemplifies the critical role of such graphical elements when aiming at understanding the architecture. In our setting, a different configuration of graphical elements had significant influence on program comprehension tasks. In particular, a 63% gain in effectiveness in architectural analysis tasks was achieved simply by changing the configuration of the graphical elements of the same tool. Based on the results, we claim that significant effort should be spent on the configuration of architecture visualization tools and that configurability should be a requirement for such tools

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“…This section introduces VisEn (for Visual Ensembles), a visual language for specifying constraints on dependencies between high-level building blocks of an application; graphical notations are supposed to be more suitable for this kind of structural dependencies [19]. VisEn is mapped to LogEn specifications, as discussed later in this section.…”

Section: Visual Dependency Specificationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Defining and continuous checking of structural program dependencies

Eichberg

Kloppenburg

Klose

et al. 2008

Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Software Engineering - ICSE '08

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Dependencies between program elements need to be modeled from different perspectives reflecting architectural, design, and implementation level decisions. To avoid erosion of the intended structure of the code, it is necessary to explicitly codify these different perspectives on the permitted dependencies and to detect violations continuously and incrementally as software evolves.We propose an approach that uses declarative queries to group source elements -across programming language module boundaries-into overlapping ensembles. The dependencies between these ensembles are also specified as logic queries. The approach has been integrated into the incremental build process of Eclipse to ensure continuous checking, using an engine for tabled and incremental evaluation of logic queries. Our evaluation shows that our approach is fast enough for day-to-day use along the incremental build process of modern IDEs.

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Understanding Software Architectures by Visualization--An Experiment with Graphical Elements

Cited by 10 publications

References 9 publications

Assessing architectural drift in commercial software development: a case study

Assessing architectural drift in commercial software development: a case study

An experiment on the role of graphical elements in architecture visualization

Defining and continuous checking of structural program dependencies

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