Tools for Software Architecture Visualization

The problem of supporting large mixed-language software systems is of great importance to the Navy and beyond. Often the only reliable source of information about their architecture is the source code itself. Having a reliable way to automatically create visualizations of the architecture is key to understanding the system, and for planning changes. We propose the development of a set of tools for automatically extracting UML design diagrams directly from the source code. The techniques will mostly be based on a static view of how objects in the code interrelate, and will allow the extraction of the class diagram, the object diagram, the interaction diagram, and the state diagram. We also propose cluster and concept analysis techniques for helping users understand the structure of less well-structured programs. These tools will be based on our existing static analysis technology, which is already highly developed for C and C++, and for which a version for Ada 95 is currently under development. We additionally propose an option to study using techniques to extract dynamic visualizations. The tool will produce output in the form of XML objects in a standard format that can imported into existing UML design tools.