Tracking and visualizing information flow in component-based systems

Component-based software engineering is aimed at managing the complexity of large-scale software development by composing systems from reusable parts. In order to understand or validate the behavior of a given system, one needs to acquire understanding of the components involved in combination with understanding how these components are instantiated, initialized and interconnected in the particular system. In practice, this task is often hindered by the heterogeneous nature of source and configuration artifacts and there is little to no tool support to help software engineers with such a system-wide analysis. This paper contributes a method to track and visualize information flow in a component-based system at various levels of abstraction. We propose a hierarchy of 5 interconnected views to support the comprehension needs of both safety domain experts and developers from our industrial partner. We discuss the implementation of our approach in a prototype tool, and present an initial qualitative evaluation of the effectiveness and usability of the proposed views for software development and software certification. The prototype was already found to be very useful and a number of directions for further improvement were suggested. We conclude by discussing these improvements and lessons learned.