DViz is a simple dependency visualizer, where dependencies can be expressed in a very simple text-based language and then visualized in a graphical UI.
During my work as a developer, I have to take on some responsibilities of what is known as DevOps.
Part of that is the documentation and tracking of feature dependencies to draw a clear picture for the product owner when they need to decide which features are to be released, and part of that is howing what features are dependent on each other.
During the development of a software product, a stable version was released and then the team added features numbered 101 through 108.
The dependencies between these features are described in a plain text file using the SimpleDot language and can be checked in to source control, example:
Feature 101 -> Feature 102
Feature 101 -> Feature 103
Feature 102 -> Feature 104
Feature 103 -> Feature 104
Feature 104 -> Feature 105
Feature 106
Feature 107 -> Feature 108
This screenshot shows what DViz displays when the file with previous content is loaded:
Unchecking Feature 103 and Feature 106 will highlight the features and their dependents in red, DViz is suggesting that not releasing these two features will mean that Feature 104 and Feature 105 also cannot be released as they depend on Feature 103 directly or indirectly.
This tool is written using C# 6.0 as a Windows Forms application on .NET 4.6.1.
The language used for defining dependencies is created as part of this tool and is called SimpleDot, which borrows the edge notation from Dot.
The graphical rendering relies on the open source tool Graphviz built by many researchers which is can be downloaded from the Graphviz website and also can be found inside the Graphviz folder in this repository.
To make the use of Graphviz easier in C#, I used GraphViz-C-Sharp-Wrapper by Jamie Dixon, which is avaliable as a NuGet package.