Visualising complex control flow

SoftArch/MTE: Generating Distributed System Test-Beds from High-Level Software Architecture Descriptions

“…The performance of deployed distributed systems has been of interest to developers for many years and has resulted in the development of a wide variety of middleware, network, database and software performance monitoring and architecture visualisation tools [27,3,8,16,34]. Many of these approaches aim to provide high-level abstractions for viewing architecture structure and/or performance results [8,16].…”

“…It also provides a set of "design critics" (2) that monitor software architecture model changes and give unobtrusive user feedback. Data collected by performance monitoring annotations in code developed from SoftArch models is used to visualize running system performance at high-levels of abstraction using SoftArch diagrams (3), showing the user relative time consumption by architecture components as well as loading on network connections, object creation metrics and so on. We wanted to try and unify our MTE work and our SoftArch work to see if we could take SoftArch architecture specifications, which include key architectural abstractions, middleware choices, client and server deployment information and so on, and generate MTE-style performance test-beds directly from these high-level architectural models.…”

A framework for visual notation exchange

“…call-graphs and control flow [1,20,27], message sequencing [30,24,31,4]; dynamic architectures [14,24]; and various run-time software characteristics like performance and resource utilisation [14,27]. Many tools have been developed to support variants of these visualisation notations, for example UML-based CASE tools [26,30], software architecture design and analysis tools [9,24,15], graph visualisation tools [11,18,20], program analysis and visualisation tools [3,24,27] and visual language tools [13,31].…”

Generation of distributed system test-beds from high-level software architecture descriptions

“…A variety of middleware, network, database and software performance monitoring and architecture visualisation tools exist [15,2,4,10,21]. These all typically require a fully developed system in order to be used, meaning either prototyping a system by hand or analysing a built system with a related architecture to that planned.…”

“…SoftArch provides a variety of predominantly graphical architecture modeling tools (1) and an extensible metamodel of available architecture elements, connectors and properties. It also provides a set of "design critics" (2) that monitor software architecture model changes and give unobtrusive user feedback. Data collected by performance monitoring annotations in code developed from SoftArch models is used to visualize running system performance at high-levels of abstraction using SoftArch diagrams (3).…”