Motivation

Software architecture visualization is a must-have tool in each software organization. The tool explores the target system by parsing the source codes or build artifacts and may visualize to abstract-level interactively in either static or dynamic representation. Some of the tool provides a calculation of metrics to evaluate the quality of the target system. These features could help stakeholders understanding a whole software system and helping in design decision process in an organization.   Problem Statement

In general, a developed software system doesn’t fit and align with the views and semantics which provided by the visualization tools. This is because the developed software system may has different architectural styles or patterns which is defined by their organization. To align with the tool, the software architecture of target system must be constructed by applying specific semantics and views. As a result, the instantiated views or models could lead to different interpretations for different peoples. This inconsistency understanding will make the tool unusable in the end and no benefit for the organization at all.   Tasks

To solve the problem, all the visualization requirements from stakeholders in the organization will be captured. After that, the result of requirements will be compared with the current state-of-the-art of software architecture visualization techniques. A conceptual design of visualization tool of target organization will be proposed. The proposed design will be validated theoretically and with the organization.   Research Questions

1. What are the state-of-the-art of architecture visualization techniques?
2. Who are target stakeholders need the software architecture visualization in the organization (KISTERS)?:
   1. What questions do we need to answer through this visualization?
   2. What are representation needs to be displayed?
   3. How can the visualization tool align with the current process?
3. How the visualization tool needed by the organization?
4. How the proposed conceptual design applicable/usable with the organization?

Research Objectives / Milestones

1. Catalog all features and requirements of all software architecture visualization tools to identify what can be compared between the state-of-the-art with current requirement of visualization from the organization.
2. Conduct a survey and an interview with selected stakeholders to get requirement of visualization.
3. Develop a conceptual design of architecture visualization tool.
4. Validate the conceptual with the organization.