VISCTE: Runtime Exploration of Component-Based Systems
André L. Santos, Ivo Albuquerque · 2016
Component-based systems are often comprised of a large number of components, as well as services for binding them together. Static visualization of component dependencies suffers from scalability issues, due to the high number of nodes and edges, despite the fact that there have been previous approaches to mitigate this problem through diagram cluttering reduction mechanisms. Another limitation of static visualization is the inability to represent bindings that are dynamically determined at runtime. In this paper, we describe VISCTE, a tool for exploring component collaborations through runtime monitoring. We target concept location at the component level, where a user-controlled recording process enables developers to obtain diagrams that depict a partial representation of the system. We materialized the approach for OSGi-based component systems and successfully experimented it with an industrial-scale component-based system.