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An experiment on the role of graphical elements in architecture visualization

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Abstract

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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Notes

  1. N(group, task type) denotes the distribution of participant performance for the tasks of type “task type” in group

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Acknowledgement

We would like to thank Marcus Ciolkowski and Sonnhild Namingha for their comments and feedback on earlier drafts of this work. Furthermore, we appreciated the valuable feedback and comments of the anonymous reviewers.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering (IESE), Fraunhofer-Platz 1, 67663, Kaiserslautern, Germany

    Jens Knodel, Dirk Muthig & Matthias Naab

Authors
  1. Jens Knodel
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  2. Dirk Muthig
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  3. Matthias Naab
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Matthias Naab.

Additional information

Editors:

Massimiliano Di Penta and Susan Sim

Appendix A—Experimental Tasks

Appendix A—Experimental Tasks

  1. 1.

    Open the view “Initial System”. What are the main subsystems in the example? Write down the package names.

Filter task, 0 points

  1. 2.

    Which of these subsystems seems to be the biggest one (hot spot)? Why do you assume this?

Basic task, 2 points

  1. 3.

    Which pairs of main subsystems have reciprocal calls and thus a cyclic dependency on this level?

Basic task, 1 point

  1. 4.

    Navigate to the children of the top-level systems and try to get a high-level understanding of the system.

There is the component org.apache.catalina.mbeans: Has this component mainly incoming or outgoing relations?

Basic task, 1 point

  1. 5.

    How many source files (.java) do belong to the component org.apache.catalina.connector?

Basic task, 1 point

  1. 6.

    To which components does org.apache.catalina.util have call relations?

Basic task, 2 points

  1. 7.

    Open the view “Catalina Task System” and switch to manual layout.

Please create a new view that contains all components of the subsystem org.apache.catalina, but without the subsystem itself. Name this new view “catalina_#”. (Selection of components uses regular expressions (arbitrary sequence of characters: “.*”)

Basic task, 1 point

  1. 8.

    Reorder the layout of org.apache.catalina in your new view in manual layout mode according to the following ideas.

The objective is to reorder the architecture of this package into a three-layer architecture. The grouping is done according to the ratio of incoming to outgoing relations of a component.

Service Layer: #in/#out → 0

Processing Layer: #in/#out ≈ 1

Library Layer: #in/#out → ∞

Transfer task, 4 points

  1. 9.

    Please create a JPEG image of the diagram showing all the top-level systems and their relations. Save this image with the name “layers_#.jpg” in the actual workspace (location can be seen in the title bar of Eclipse).

Filter task, 0 points

  1. 10.

    Open the view “Tomcat Task System”. Looking at the static architectural view only: How does the processing of the network protocol TCP (org.apache.tomcat.util.net) differ from the processing of the web protocol HTTP (org.apache.tomcat.util.http)?

Transfer task, 3 points

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Knodel, J., Muthig, D. & Naab, M. An experiment on the role of graphical elements in architecture visualization. Empir Software Eng 13, 693–726 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-008-9069-5

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