Abstract

As microservices become more popular, more drawbacks become apparent to developers. One issue that many teams face today is the failure to visualize the entire system architecture holistically. Without a full view of the system, the architecture can become convoluted as teams add and subtract from their system without reconciling their changes. One established practice to determine a view on the entire system involves dynamic analysis of microservice interaction and dependencies. In this mapping study, we investigate dynamic analysis as a way to visualize system architecture. Capturing the architectural view with dynamic analysis has the ability to build the system and then show its behavior at run-time. We identify dynamic analysis techniques, the corresponding tools, and the models that these practices can generate. The findings of this study are relevant to developers of decentralized systems looking for a way to visualize their system architecture in a dynamic perspective.