Visualization of areas of interest in component-based system architectures

Understanding complex component-based systems often requires getting insight in how certain system properties, such as performance, trust, reliability, or structural attributes, correspond to the actual system architecture. Such properties can be seen as defining several ‘areas of interest’ over the system architecture. We present an interactive tool that efficiently and effectively combines visual presentation of component-based architectures with that of areas of interest. Our tool helps users investigate how various system properties correlate with each other and correspond to the actual architecture, while preserving the visual architecture layout familiar to designers. We validate our tool and the proposed techniques on a component framework used in the industry.