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Ask HN: Visualizing software designs, especially of large systems (if at all)?

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Re: Ask HN: Visualizing software designs, especially of large systems (if at all)?

#11

Post by TreyS »

Different types of diagrams highlight different aspects of a system.

If you can, try to put together 2 different diagrams presenting different views. For example, sequence diagrams, model diagrams, etc. each tell you something different. Having a few different perspectives on the same system will give you a richer understanding.

Not specifically related to visualization, but, also, if you spend a lot of time trying to understand a piece of code, once you understand it, document it (e.g. in a function or method comment). Over time, this makes a huge difference and will help you and others out when you revisit the code later.

Re: Ask HN: Visualizing software designs, especially of large systems (if at all)?

#13

Post by rscho »

agentultra wrote: post #6

Depends on what you want to understand about the system. If you're looking to understand it's properties and how it behaves I would look into something more robust like Alloy 6 [0] which has a great visualization system for inspecting models. However if you're looking for a class diagram tool then it's outside your wheelhouse. There's also something I've played around with a bit but haven't used seriously: Moose [1].…

Moose looks really impressive, visually! I think it's one of the flagship Pharo applications.

Re: Ask HN: Visualizing software designs, especially of large systems (if at all)?

#14

Post by flurly »

I'm a big fan of Terrastruct (https://terrastruct.com/). They focus on building great software for visualizing complex software architecture. Their secret sauce is this idea of attention where they allow you to zoom in and out so you can get the 10 foot view or 10,000 foot view, whatever you find most useful.

Re: Ask HN: Visualizing software designs, especially of large systems (if at all)?

#15

Post by _dain_ »

PaulHoule wrote: post #2

This tool is good for making simple UML diagrams and even lets you do it with simplified syntax https://plantuml.com/ I'd say the big problem in visualizing big systems is that you can't usefully do it in one graph. For instance I worked on a system that had 2000+ database tables if you were going to make a diagram of that which shows everything it is going to take up a long wall. (This can be useful, but it is a big…

wikipedia page says suicide

Re: Ask HN: Visualizing software designs, especially of large systems (if at all)?

#16

Post by buescher »

_dain_ wrote: post #10

No automated tool will come close to having a 5 minute conversation with the main designer and having him draw you a diagram freehand on the back of a napkin. This is a social and organizational and communication problem, not technical. If that can't be done, there are some interesting things you can try. A lot of the suggestions in the thread are "top down" methods; you can get a lot of value out of "bottom up" visu…

The way to capture the content of a conversation like that, so that more than one person at a time can easily benefit from it, is in a theory of operation document with appropriate illustrations. Simple block diagrams will take you far before you need to specify something in the level of detail that the UML supports.

I like the range of approaches in the Architecture of Open Source Applications books: http://aosabook.org/en/index.html

Re: Ask HN: Visualizing software designs, especially of large systems (if at all)?

#17

Post by zero_shift »

The challenge is that there are different ways of "mapping" software.

You could map the way programs fit into machines, and the networks between them. This would be the topology.

You can map the way services call upon one another with requests. This is the service graph.

You can map how systems interact over events or shared resources. You could say this is the logical graph.

The problem happens when you try and graph them all at once. It's the same as trying to draw a real map, with all the services, bus routes, railways, shops and administrative regions superimposed on one image. It's very busy.

So I use separate maps.

Tools are another matter. Personally I use Mermaid for graphs. I also have my own tools that create SVG visualisations using DAGre. This can be helpful for interactive visualisations where you can click into different nodes and explore more detail.

My system uses CloudFormation templates and our in house deployment DSLs to figure out the "topology", then let the users see the different superimposed "graphs" as they see fit

Re: Ask HN: Visualizing software designs, especially of large systems (if at all)?

#19

Post by tikimcfee »

otras wrote: post #9

I gave this a bit of thought earlier this year ( https://alexanderell.is/posts/visualizing-code/ ) and, with the help of HN commenters, collected a small list of ways people are working to help with code visualization. I don't think most of them are production ready (some are just research papers), but you may find them interesting all the same. SoftVis3D ( https://softvis3d.com/ ): where a "‘code city’ view provides…

If I may be so bold as include something I’m working on myself, I’d love to chime in! I’m not functionally complete, but feel like I’m writing an amalgamation of all of the above tools.

https://github.com/tikimcfee/LookAtThat : A macOS and iOS app to load, analyze, and walk around your Swift code, version 0.0.0-prealpha!

Re: Ask HN: Visualizing software designs, especially of large systems (if at all)?

#20

Post by fasteddie31003 »

I'm a visual learner. I wanted a way to see how documentation of complex systems looked too. I'm working on a https://gainknowhow.com/software-companies.html . It is basically like a mind map for documentation. The high level documentation like core values is on top connected through learning paths to learn the complete context of low-level skills.
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