Interactive System Architecture Exploration: Case Studies With The Imiger Tool

Software systems of all kinds tend to be complex, easily comprising hundreds of components of various types and many more interconnections. Understanding of their internal structure through appropriate visualization is, therefore, a challenging task, especially when hierarchical decomposition is not possible. Among the key hindrances in existing graph-based visualizations of such systems are visual clutter and the contradictory requirements of ideally seeing the whole system context while showing enough details to analyze particular elements. Addressing such issues to enable effective comprehension of large multi-modal graphs, we developed a method of their exploration leaning on user interaction with the diagram and details on demand principle, implemented in IMiGEr. In this paper, we show the key techniques it employs, explain their combination and illustrate the benefits on the representative tasks in software architecture understanding.