Automated Visualisation of Product Deployment

Sammanfattning

The development of large products, whether it is software or hardware, faces many challenges. Two of these challenges are to keep everyone involved up-to-date on the latest developments, and to get a clear overview of the components of the product. A proposed solution is to have a graph presenting all the necessary information about the product. The issue with having a graph of a constantly changing product is that it requires a lot of maintenance to keep it up-to-date. This thesis presents the implementation of a software for Ericsson, that can gather automatically the required information about a given product and creates a graph to present it. The software traverses a file structure, containing information about a product, and stores it. This information is then used to create two different graphs: a tree graph and a box graph.The graphs were evaluated, both by the author and by the team at Ericsson, based on visualisation principles. The results show that the automatically gathered information is effective and can communicate the information needed. The tree graph receives slightly favourable reviews in comparison to the currently available and manually created graph. However, limitations for graph layout on the visualisation tool made the graphs larger than necessary and, therefore, harder to understand. In order to achieve a better result, other visualisation tools could be considered. The software created tree graphs that are useable at Ericsson, and could prove helpful for development.