Slicing and Visualizing F' Topologies with F'Prism

Author(s)

Li, Jialong ; Tsigkanos, Christos ; Ubukata, Toshihide ; Nakagawa, Elisa Yumi ; Mao, Zhenyu ; Li, Nianyu ; Tei, Kenji

• Document type: Journal article
• Source: SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURE: ECSA 2023 TRACKS, WORKSHOPS, AND DOCTORAL SYMPOSIUM, ECSA 2023, CASA 2023, AMP 2023, FAACS 2023, DEMESSA 2023, QUALIFIER 2023, TWINARCH 2023; v. 14590, p. 15-pg., 2024-01-01.

Abstract

As the barriers to entry in the aerospace industry continue to decrease, software engineering techniques are increasingly being integrated into spaceflight software development methods. F', an opensource software framework developed by JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory), leverages component-based architectures with a strict, finegrained, and explicit declaration of components with typed ports, fostering compile-time correctness guarantees, modularity, and reusability. However, such declaration inevitably increases architectural complexity, leading to potential pitfalls in understandability of such componentbased architectures and maintainability of systems built using F'. To mitigate the aforementioned problem, this paper presents F'Prism, an open-source tool that incorporates automated architecture slicing into topology visualization by employing three architecture-general and three spaceflight-specific slicing criteria tailored for F' architectures. Our observation shows architecture slicing has potential to improve visualization and comprehension of such complex, critical software architectures. (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 15/24144-7 - Technologies and solutions for enabling the cloud of things paradigm
• Grantee: José Neuman de Souza
• Support Opportunities: Research Projects - Thematic Grants