A system for visualizing binary component-based program structure with component functional size

Component-based software development is a development approach which aims to reduce development costs and increase software reliability. With component-based development, often new program is created quickly by reusing components in binary form that have been developed by third parties, without access to the source code of those components. In order to maintain such program on an on-going basis, it is important to be able to visualize the overall structure and behavior of the program. However, because existing program visualization systems need to analyze the program source code, it has been difficult to apply them to program that incorporates components in binary form. In this paper, we propose a program visualization system which does not make use of the source code, but uses two techniques, reflection and byte-code analysis, to measure the functional size of each component and to determine the dependency relationships among components and helper classes. These results are used to provide an accurate visualization of the overall structure of the component-based program. Our system can be applied to programs built with JavaBeans components. As a result of comparative evaluations, it is found that our system is useful for visualizing binary component-based program structure with component functional size to support maintenance activities.