Back
Raglianti_Andre_2025_IEEE_VISSOFT.pdf
Conference paper (in proceedings)

Visualizing and exploring data access in microservices using interactive treemaps

  • André, Maxime Namur Digital Institute, University of Namur, Belgium
  • Raglianti, Marco ORCID Istituto del software (SI), Facoltà di scienze informatiche, Università della Svizzera italiana, Svizzera
  • Cleve, Anthony Namur Digital Institute, University of Namur, Belgium
  • Lanza, Michele ORCID Istituto del software (SI), Facoltà di scienze informatiche, Università della Svizzera italiana, Svizzera
  • 2025
Published in:
  • IEEE Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT). - 2025, p. 36-46
Microservices
Data access
Treemap
Software visualization
Exploration
English The popularity of microservices has grown significantly over the past decade. This architectural style is praised for its ability to ease software evolution, particularly due to the modular, heterogeneous, and dynamic communication nature of microservices. This new way of designing applications has also impacted how databases are integrated. Practitioners generally opt for polyglot persistence, meaning that each microservice manages its own database(s). Decoupling, heterogeneity, and distribution introduce implicit dependencies and multiply data access endpoints. This results in added complexity and challenges in understanding change propagation, which can only be addressed through manual browsing of the codebase, a time-consuming, error-prone, and cumbersome process. A holistic view of such architectures is essential, especially for enabling developers to understand, maintain, and optimize the complex interactions across microservices, particularly from a data perspective. We extend a visualization-based approach to support both a high-level view and fine-grained inspection of microservices. Based on static analysis, we generate an interactive treemap for an entire microservices architecture, providing both an overview and the means for more detailed exploration. We evaluated our approach by assessing the scalability and effectiveness of our visualization. First, we generated interactive treemaps for 10 non-trivial microservices architectures. Then, in a qualitative user study, we asked 6 professional developers to perform specific exploration and understanding tasks (e.g., understanding architectural structure, assessing concept spreading, evaluating technology breakdown, comparing versions, identifying anti-patterns). Our results show that interactive treemaps provide the holistic view needed to aid in evolution tasks.
Collections
Language
  • English
Classification
Computer science and technology
License
Rights reserved
Open access status
green
Identifiers
Persistent URL
https://n2t.net/ark:/12658/srd1333730
Statistics
Document views: 11 File downloads:
  • Raglianti_Andre_2025_IEEE_VISSOFT.pdf: 12