Visualizing software for telecommunication services

ABSTRACT

An active research area in telecommunications concerns how to specify and control the addition of new services, such as call waiting or instant messaging, into existing software. One approach is to rely on a component-based architecture such as Distributed Feature Composition (DFC), by which a new service can be specified as a composition of primitive features over time. Formally, a communication episode is represented by a dynamic graph of software feature boxes, called a usage. This serves as the fundamental model for how services are invoked and how they interact with other services.This paper, after providing some background on DFC, discusses a technique for visualizing the usages which arise through DFC specifications. With the visualization, users can monitor and validate service protocols and feature interactions in real time or through playback logs. The principal display component uses a novel variation of force-directed layouts for undirected graphs. The resulting graphical interface has become a principal tool for developers building services using DFC.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.5 Testing and Debugging

Keywords:
algorithm animation, graph layout