Hi, On Fri, Oct 4, 2013 at 2:42 PM, Goubier Thierry <thierry.goubier@cea.fr>wrote:
Le 04/10/2013 14:14, Tudor Girba a écrit :
Hi,
On Fri, Oct 4, 2013 at 1:41 PM, Goubier Thierry <thierry.goubier@cea.fr <mailto:thierry.goubier@cea.fr**>> wrote:
Hi Tudor,
I found your visualisation very interesting, and wondered about one thing linked to your blog post and if I got it right.
The visualisation you're showing is able to show, at the single class level, if a class is more or less regular (i.e. tidy == well designed?) but you show that it will loose very shortly it's tidy shape if the classes it joins to are added to the visualisation. And I wondered if this was a choice on the graph layout algorithm you've choosen, i.e. that maintaining the tidiness of the class could be done with a different layout algorithm? Maybe one which has a measure of tidiness of the class at the local level, and weight it against the position and attraction of its links to the other components in the application?
My argumentation is that if we look at a class isolated it will have a certain shape, and because we are exposed to this view (the IDE is always showing me only that) all the time we will optimize it such that the shape is tidy. But if we look at the class in the context of its interactions the shape will be less recognizable. The chosen layout is a very simple one, and the goal is not to say whether the structure is good or bad. This is neither good nor bad. It simply argues how steering the architecture has to take these forces into account.
Hum, my point would be that a locally well designed class is a factor to strive for; also that the overall architecture has it's impact on it as well, but not so as to so easily erase the local good property when looking at the visualisation, otherwise the latter may not end up so usefull, that's all.
I do agree with your point, I just believe the layout could carry a bit more insight in trying to both show the local property the code was trying to achieve (and areas where it failed) and the "emergence" of the architecture coupling on it. Your representation seemed to imply that local good design is unimportant in the architectural view, and I'm sure this is not what it is supposed to convey.
There are many visualizations that try to capture good and bad, but I distinctly did not want the visualization to be about this. It is about how context changes the shape. As a consequence, architecture does not exist without the context, and as the context evolves in millions of little ways, so does architecture. Constantly. That is all. The main goal is to support technical people argue when discussing with managers, rather than necessarily having a say about the value. But, here is a challenge: would you like to play with it and propose a different approach? Btw, the current implementation has 19 lines :).
In the mean time, I'm slowly discovering we have amazing software
architecture visualisation tools :)
They really are amazing :). If you want to get more information about it, you can join the Moose mailing list: http://www.moosetechnology.**org/about/contact<http://www.moosetechnology.org/about/contact>
I'll do once I have a strong/practical incentive :) I know its there, Stéphane showed a lot of interesting things in it when he came here, but I didn't managed to organize things around that subject.
Would really like to setup a project on that if I get the chance.
What do you mean? What kind of a project?
Collaborative R or R&D project :) Only way I can justify working on something like that...
A good fit would be visualisation of large software in my lab expertise area : high performance and real time massively parallel software on embedded systems.
Perhaps you can get some inspiration of places to use Moose in on the humane-assessment.com site. In particular, on the blog I try to offer examples and stories for how assessment should change the face of development :). Cheers, Doru Thierry
-- Thierry Goubier CEA list Laboratoire des Fondations des Systèmes Temps Réel Embarqués 91191 Gif sur Yvette Cedex France Phone/Fax: +33 (0) 1 69 08 32 92 / 83 95
-- www.tudorgirba.com "Every thing has its own flow"