Run-Time Monitoring and Real-Time Visualization of Software Architectures

Software architecture stands at the backbone of any software system. An up-to-date description of the architecture greatly contributes to its understanding, evaluation and evolution. Despite its importance, the architecture is typically described only in the preliminary development phases and later becomes subject of continuous degradation. Therefore, methods and corresponding tool support for reconstructing the current views of a system's architecture have been developed and proposed. Current state of the art addresses the reconstruction of static and dynamic views separately. The reconstruction is typically conducted post-mortem using heavy weight infrastructures. We have conceptually defined and built a light-weight run-time monitoring infrastructure that produces meaningful real-time visualizations of object-level interactions. We consider that the possibility to observe the behavior of a system in real-time positively impacts the documentation of the software architecture, its understandability, communication and trace ability to usage scenarios. We have evaluated the monitoring infrastructure on a software project in different development stages. The evaluation has shown very promising results.