Software Development Dependency Mapping

[SimonMac]

I think where I am at the moment needs something like this, basically we are after a product which can track/map inter-dependencies with in the services that are being designed and wrote by our in house team, so they know if they change X it will effect Y and Z.

The TA is fixated with having a CMDB, but I think this is OTT, worse case a Visio diagram with linked schemeas and DLL's etc will do, but is there a more elegant approach that can be used? We are coding mainly in C# or XSLT at the moment

[Fandango]

are the dependancies for services that are within the same software solution or those external to it as well?

[SimonMac]

are the dependancies for services that are within the same software solution or those external to it as well?

I would just say internal at the moment, there are a lot of common shared libraries, at the moment when something is changed its a wait and see as to what else breaks in another part of the code

[Doggy Styles]

What about a dreaded spreadsheet?

[SimonMac]

What about a dreaded spreadsheet?

I think that is even more low tech than the Visio, I assume when I feed back to the TA it will not be an "elegant" enough solution, or in other words if they did this from day one a Spreadsheet would probably have been good enough, but as they are playing catch up I think they want something mess manual

[Fandango]

Are you using Visual Studio?

In VS2010 there are a couple of features which might do what you want

Class Dependency Graphs > Exercise 1: Introduction to Class Dependency Graphs

Architecture Explorer > Exercise 1: Introduction to Architecture Explorer

[Freamon]

Why not just implement CI and automated testing so that you know if a change breaks something?

[SimonMac]

Why not just implement CI and automated testing so that you know if a change breaks something?

That is a whole other story!

[devenson]

Pathway Systems Blueprints does dependency mapping

Hi guys,

I'm the CTO of Pathway Systems, and just registered to answer your
question about a dependency mapping solution for software development.

We have a few customers which document and analyze the dependencies of
their custom deployed code using our product called Blueprints.

What makes it special is the ability to ask Blueprints to draw specific
topologies of the graph of dependencies you've documented. A typical
query is to show what might be impacted by a failure of a particular
component. Here's an example diagram of an application called snarf.
The dotted lines denote that one thing depends up another.

pathwaysystems.com/~devenson/snarf.png

There's videos of the product in action at our website.

<Mod snip. Happy to let this through but I think we can let people find their own way to the vids>

Thanks,
-Dan

[SimonMac]

Funny enough this was one of the applications I was looking at