Visualizing and Analyzing Software Infrastructures

Operations in today's large corporations are usually supported by complex software infrastructures that involve hundreds or thousands of software systems.Companies frequently need to redesign their software infrastructures in response to marketplace changes in the. This article describes the Enterprise Navigator, a system that lets architects visualize system interconnections of selected products and services by making database queries on the Web. Moreover, analysis tools are provided for the architects to examine dominating information flows, perform clustering analysis to find substructures, and study the structural evolution of particular business processes or functions. The system has been used extensively on AT&T's System Profile Database. The article also includes a case study to show how an architect can use Enterprise Navigator to perform various visualization and analysis tasks.