Duration: 30:45

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Even when using a modular software framework such as OSGi to structure software projects, architects and programmers can quickly lose the overview of how all the bundles and features correlate with each other and how the services as the bundle's interfaces are provided and used. Surely, some project members know about these connections and have some mental model of what is happening in the system. Documentation and the manifest, feature, etc. files will eventually provide that information to the curious reader. However, depending on that can be very time consuming and frustrating, especially if the documentation was not maintained carefully or if the project itself grows too big.

This session will show you that these problems can be avoided by using an interactive visualization from the open-source project "Visible Code" to browse through the dependency and service structures of projects, setting up self-updating visualizations for specific parts of the system, and using them for documentation purposes to easily explain the project to new members. "Visible Code" is a cojoint project of the Kiel University and Scheidt & Bachmann System Technik GmbH and currently works on the analysis of complex modular applications and its visualization built on the Eclipse Layout Kernel (ELK) as an Eclipse Plugin. Perspectively this will be expanded to be presented in a web view using Theia technology to enable to show OSGi structure and state also at runtime in a web-console.

Speaker(s):
Niklas Rentz (Kiel University, Faculty of Engineering)
Hauke Fuhrmann (Scheidt & Bachmann System Technik GmbH)