DocTool - a tool for visualizing software projects using graph database

Abstract

In an organization a software development life cycle consists of teams working in different structural hierarchies. Maintaining a complex software where continuous additions and updations are performed by different developers is a challenging task. Also there is a certain amount of latency in communication between two teams regarding an entity of interest in the software. Different software visualization tools have been proposed to address these issues. Many of them provide a view of the software structure by parsing through the source code and analyzing the depth and quality of code. In this paper we propose a DocTool which provide a simple and easy to use solution to two problems: (i) Visualizing the entities of a software and their properties and (ii) Visualizing the workflow in the software. The tool uses a set of json files and a graph database as the backbone. The solution proposed is very simple and provides the user total control over the data he wants to focus on. The tool can be implemented for softwares developed in any kind of platform. The design and implementation of the tool for a Java Web Application software are discussed in this paper.