Visualization of the Static aspects of Software: a survey

International audienceSoftware is usually complex and always intangible. In practice, the development and maintenance processes are time-consuming activities mainly because software complexity is difficult to manage. Graphical visualization of software has the potential to result in a better and faster understanding of its design and functionality, saving time and providing valuable information to improve its quality. However, visualizing software is not an easy task because of the huge amount of information comprised in the software. Furthermore, the information content increases significantly once the time dimension to visualize the evolution of the software is taken into account. Human perception of information and cognitive factors must thus be taken into account to improve the understandability of the visualization. In this paper, we survey visualization techniques, both 2D- and 3D-based, representing the static aspects of the software and its evolution. We categorize these techniques according to the issues they focus on, in order to help compare them and identify the most relevant techniques and tools for a given problem

Embedding architectural support in industry

Software architecture plays a vital role in the development (and hence maintenance) of large complex systems with a long lifetime. It is therefore required that the software architecture is also maintained, i.e. sufficiently documented, clearly communicated, and explicitly controlled. In our experience, these requirements cannot be met without appropriate support. Commercial-off-the-shelf support for architectural maintenance is still scarcely available, if at all, implying the need to develop appropriate proprietary means. In this paper, we briefly report upon an overall approach taken within three organizations within Philips that develop professional systems. We extensively describe the experience gained with the embedding of architectural support in these three organizations. We focus on architectural support in the area of software architecture recovery, visualization, analysis, and verification. In our experience, the support must be carried by a number of elements of software development, and all of these elements have to go through a change process to ensure sustainable embedding. We distinguish four of these elements, i.e. process, organization, software development environment, and humans, and present our experience in terms of those elements