Author: Dietmar Menges

Visualizing an Architecture Aspect as a UML Component Diagram

Dietmar Menges Leave a comment

Sonargraph’s domain specific language (DSL) to describe architecture aspects is very powerful. An architecture aspect consists at least of 1 top-level architecture file that has been added to the architecture configuration and is checked automatically. Such a top-level architecture file can include other architecture files reusing common definitions. With our latest release (11.4.0) we complemented the strictly text based representation of architecture aspects with a UML component generator.

A generated UML component diagram complements in several ways our text based architecture aspects:

  • It is a commonly accepted form of communicating architecture definitions
  • It shows the resulting architecture aspect event if it is spread over several files in 1 diagram
  • It can be used to cross-check the underlying text based architecture aspect (i.e. are the resulting restrictions the intended ones?)
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Design Architecture Improvements using Sonargraph’s Architectural View

Dietmar Menges 2 Comments

In the last couple of months we added support for the interactive modeling of architectural aspects in Sonargraph. Whilst our architecture DSL is tremendously powerful, there are situations where the new interactive modeling via the Architectural view is more appealing.

The Architectural view is is ideal for exploring architecture, designing architectural aspects and simulation of code refactorings on existing (even unfamiliar) code bases. Its power is derived from the unique combination of code exploration, architecture definition, simulation of code refactorings and visual feedback of architectural issues in real time.

For this blog post I chose FreeMind as example project, a freely available software written in Java offering a user interface based on Swing/AWT. The hypothetical task at hand is to see what needs to be done to implement another user interface based on let’s say SWT. The author of that popular free mind-mapping software probably never envisioned this requirement, but we have all seen frameworks come and go, so this is not a far-fetched requirement and is obviously not limited to SWT. I picked the software solely as an example to demonstrate how Sonargraph’s Architectural view helps to prepare the existing code base for such a task.

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Identifying Dependencies for Breaking Cycles

Dietmar Menges 2 Comments

Dependency cycles in software systems have very negative impact on characteristics like testability, understandability and reuse (as explained here). Cycles with only a few nodes (say 5 to 10) might be resolveable quite simply by manually analyzing them. For bigger cycles it is helpful to have an automated analysis at hand based on an algorithm solving the minimum feedback arc set problem. A feedback arc set of a directed graph is a subset of its arcs that upon removal would transform a cyclic into an acyclic directed graph. Such an algorithm combined with user input about the domain (i.e. which dependencies are absolutely necessary and which absolutely violate design decisions) is able to deliver excellent results. Read More

Assess and Control Component Coupling in Software Systems

Dietmar Menges 1 Comment

Over time software systems tend to develop several negative symptoms: simple changes require a surprisingly big effort to be implemented, changes cause the system to break in unrelated areas, reuse of code in other systems is simply not  feasible, the code is hard to read and understand even for the directly involved programmers. One of the main reasons of facing these symptoms is an unintended increase of the overall system coupling.

Except for very small systems the manual control of the overall coupling is a tedious task – a tool-based approach is needed. Sonargraph-Explorer is such a tool and among other things it helps the developer to assess and control coupling and work against its accidental increase. It is the first product built upon the new Sonargraph Next Generation platform supporting Java, C# and C/C++. It offers different visualizations of dependency structures and a powerful scripting engine based on Groovy which allows extending the built-in analysis capabilities.

The following content introduces the needed definitions and terms related to component coupling (one way to express the overall system coupling). It explains how to use Sonargraph Explorer to visualize the corresponding dependencies and determine components contributing significantly to the overall system coupling with a custom script automatically. Read More