Using Concept Maps to Enhance System View Navigation

If one is to understand how a system meets its quality goals they must understand the elements and the relationships among the elements of the system. These relationships span multiple views of the system. View-based documentation of software architectures improves the ability of stakeholders to understand the system and in particular how the system meets its quality goals [Clements]. However, in order to understand the relationships among elements of different types in a system one must provide a mapping across views. Concept maps are a tool for visualizing relationships between different concepts. In this paper we describe the application of concept maps as a solution to the problem of mapping across different views of software, which in the past, have limited the stakeholder’s ability to understand the complex relationships that exist in software.