Arvisan: an Interactive Tool for Visualisation and Analysis of Low-Code Architecture Landscapes
Roy Kakkenberg, Satrio Adi Rukmono, Michel R. V. Chaudron, Wim Gerholt, Miguel Pinto, Claudio Ribeiro de Oliveira · 2024
This paper introduces Arvisan, an interactive tool for visualization and analysis of low-code architecture landscapes. Arvisan improves upon existing low-code architecture assessment tools, particularly Discovery, which is used to verify the technical integrity and adherence to architectural rules in OutSystems applications. Arvisan offers overviews as a sliding window across abstraction levels, highly interactive visualization, and a variety of quality analyses. Arvisan uses a graph-based visualisation approach to architecture analysis. The information on the components of OutSystems is modelled as a labelled property graph. The tool is applied to an industrial-scale application landscape. Arvisan provides several advantages over Discovery: it offers a unified overview, efficient navigation, overview on different levels of abstraction, and the ability to detect indirect dependency cycles. The tool was evaluated with the OutSystems low-code platform and received positive feedback from developers. Arvisan contributes to the arsenal of tools for analysing architectures of low-code systems.