Visualization Framework for Software Design Analysis

Visualization has often been used to facilitate the processing, comprehension, anal-ysis, and management of information. Graphs are a visualization mechanism that are frequently used in computer applications as a data structure to visualize objects and relationships between them. The goal of this thesis was to provide a tool that facilitates the comprehension and detailed analysis of small complex graphs. This tool, also called the Alloy Visualization Tool, used four main techniques to achieve its goal: focus by eliminating unnecessary parts of the graph, differentiating compo-nents of different types, enabling layout clarity, and providing higher-arity relation constructs. The tool can also save and load instances that represent objects and rela-tionships between them and customizations on how to view the instances. This tool was applied to an object modeling tool, the Alloy Analyzer, but can also be used as a standalone tool