Getting the big picture of the structure or behaviour of a large software system is a non-trivial task, particularly since there is no unique such picture and the qualities that make such a picture useful depend on the task at hand and can shift from moment to moment.  This kind of analysis may be needed to modify the large-scale structure of a system, to plan what-if scenarios about such changes, or to understand what is there now.

Publications

• Robert J. Walker, Gail C. Murphy, Jeffrey Steinbok, and Martin P. Robillard. Efficient mapping of software system traces to architectural views. In Proceedings of the 2000 Conference of the IBM Centre for Advanced Studies on Collaborative Research (CASCON 2000), pages 31–40, 2000. doi: 10.1145/782034.782046

• Robert J. Walker, Gail C. Murphy, Jeffrey Steinbok, and Martin P. Robillard. Efficient Mapping of Software System Traces to Architectural Views. Technical report TR-00-09, Department of Computer Science, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, July 2000. 9 pages.

• Robert J. Walker, Gail C. Murphy, Bjorn Freeman-Benson, Darin Wright, Darin Swanson, and Jeremy Isaak. Visualizing dynamic software system information through high-level models. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA '98), pages 271–283, 1998. doi: 10.1145/286936.286966