Package Surface Blueprints: Visually Supporting the Understanding of Package Relationships

Abstract

ership basic structure, architectural elements...). Packages provide or require services. They can play core roles or Large object-oriented applications are structured over contain accessory code features. Maintainers of large applilarge number ofpackages. Packages are important but comcations face the problem of understanding how packages are plex structural entities that may be difficult to understand structured in general and how packages are in relation with since they play different development roles (i.e., class coneach others in their provider/consumer roles. This problem tainers, code ownership basic structure, architectural elewas experienced first-hand by the first author while preparing ments...). Maintainers of large applicationsface the problem the 3.9 release of Squeak, a large open-source Smalltalk [8].of understanding how packages are structured in general In addition, approaches that support application remodularand how they relate to each others. In this paper, we present ization [1, 20, 22] succeed in producing alternative views for a compact visualization, named Package Surface Blueprint, system refactorings, but proposed changes remain difficult that qualifies the relationships that a package has with its to understand and assess. There is a good support for the neighbours. A Package Surface Blueprint represents packalgorithmic parts but little support to understand their results.ages around the notion ofpackage surfaces: groups of relaHence it is difficult to assess the multiple solutions. tionships according to the packages they refer to. We present Several previous works provide information on packages two specific views one stressing the references made by a and their relationships, by visualizing software artifacts, metpackage and another showing the inheritance structure of rics, their structure or their evolution [6, 7, 10, 19, 23, 28]. a package. We applied the visualization on two large case However, while these approaches are valuable, they fall short studies: Argo UML and Squeak.of providing a fine-grained view of packages that would help This paper makes heavy use of colors in the figures. Please understanding the package shapes (the number of classes it obtain and read an online (colored) version of this paper to better defines, the inheritance relationships of the internal classes, how the internal class inherit from external ones...) and help identifying their roles within an application. In this paper, we propose Package Surface Blueprint, a IIntroduction compact visualization revealing package structure and relationships. A package blueprint is structured around the concept of surface, which represents the relationships beTo cope with the complexity of large software systems, tween the observed package and its provider packages. The applications are structured in subsystems or packages. It Package Surface Blueprint reveals the overall size and inis now frequent to have large object-oriented applications ternal complexity of a package, as well as its relation with structured ...

Identifying Cycle Causes with Enriched Dependency Structural Matrix

“…: It takes the focus of a package and shows how such package uses and is used by the other package [10]. It provides a fine-grained view, however package blueprint lacks (1) the identification of cycles at system level and (2) the detailed focus on classes actually doing the cycles.…”

“…Currently we cannot show such valuable information. We plan to use a specific visualization, such as Package Blueprint [10], showing all dependencies from/to one single package in a pop-up view.…”

“…Lanza et al [8] propose to recover high-level views by visualizing relationships. Package Surface Blueprint [10] reveals the package internal structure and relationships among other packages -surface represents relations between the analyzed package and its provider packages. Dong and Godfrey [4] propose high-level object dependency graphs to represent and understand the system package structure.…”

Efficient Retrieval and Ranking of Undesired Package Cycles in Large Software Systems.

“…Some other approaches propose to recover software structure and visualize the organization of classes and files [MM06]. To understand the complexity of large object-oriented software systems and particularly the package structure, there are some visualization tools [DGK06,DL05,BDL05,LSP05]. Package Blueprint [DPS + 07] shows the communications between packages.…”

On porting software visualization tools to the web

“…3. The Web portal represents the front-end of the framework (developed using the Seaside framework [12]) accessible through a web browser. It allows users to create the models and to analyze them by means of different web-based visualizations.…”