Dependency analysis and visualization tool for Kactus2 IP-XACT design framework

Abstract

Large-scale HW and SW projects contain thousands of source files, which requires proper file management in order to keep track of changes and keep the code in compilable state. Different parts of the system depend on each other, and even a small change in a certain part of the code may break the other parts. Dependency analysis can be used to prevent such problems by visualizing the SW structure so that dependencies are easily seen by the developer. This paper presents a novel tool for file dependency and change analysis and visualization that was implemented into our IP-XACT based Kactus2 design environment (GPL2). The tool is capable of sorting source files into IP-XACT file sets, extracting and visualizing file dependencies, and keeping track of changed files. It also offers the ability to create manual dependencies, e.g., between source code and documentation. The dependency and change analysis of 1k source code files containing 140k lines of code is performed in less than two minutes.