Deconstructing Software

Structure101 V3 Released, Adds Architecture Control for Teams

Released today, the new version 3 capabilities make Structure101 a nicely rounded architectural control solution in addition to the previous structural analysis and complexity measurement capabilities.

For example:

• You can now define layering constraints on your code-base using simple, intuitive architecture block diagrams
• Communicate these architecture diagrams to the development team through IDE plug-ins
• Developers get warned immediately if they make code changes that are inconsistent with the architecture
• RSS activity feeds let you know if new architecture violations make it into a build

Also, there's a new online demo (about 13 minutes, with audio (me!)) and the version 3 Help is available online.

Full press release

Enjoy!

A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods

A lot of work went into this. A "periodic table" of visualization methods for data, information, concepts, strategy, metaphors, process and structure.

Here's a screen shot - be sure and visit the original if you're interested - when you mouse over each cell, you get an example of the corresponding visualization method.

I didn't see any of the visualization techniques used by structure101 for visualizing software dependencies and architectural layers. It is more focused on business processes, though Data Flow (Df), Entity-relationship (E) and Flowchart (Fl) diagrams are there.