eCITY+: A Tool to Analyze Software Architectural Relations through Interactive Visual Support

Current tools to analyze software architecture structure and its evolution tend to focus more towards exploring the architectural elements, their quality measures, and their evolution as compared to the information contained in the inter-dependencies of the system itself. In this tool demo paper, we present our eCITY+ tool that provides an interactive visualization aimed at assisting software engineers and architects to additionally comprehend the architectural ties between software components. Further, it shows how these relations evolve over time. To achieve these goals, eCITY+ represents architectural relationships as hierarchical edge bundles on top of an evolving software city metaphor and unravels the evolution of these relations through the use of animations. Additionally, we present a discussion on the challenges while implementing these ideas in the large.