AIVA vs UML: Comparison of Component Application Visualizations in a Case-study

Abstract

UML is the state of the art in visualization of software. However, it does not satisfy the needs of modeling in the domain of component applications and complex software architectures. UML has to be extended with profiles so as to be able to model the specifics of a particular component model; its diagrams are not scalable, therefore one has to balance the amount of information and readability; and it presents all the information at once so visual data mining is harder. These were the reasons for developing a completely new approach called AIVA (Advanced Interactive Visualization Approach) that focuses solely on the component domain and addresses the problems of scalability and readability by adopting interactive techniques like information hiding and details on demand. In this paper we analyse how this new approach stands compared with UML by modelling a nontrivial component application.