Visually Analyzing Company-wide Software Service Dependencies: An Industrial Case Study

TL;DR

This paper presents a force-directed visualization tool for understanding and managing complex software service dependencies within a large organization, aiding decision-making and service management.

Contribution

It introduces a novel visualization and filtering tool developed for SAP to analyze company-wide service dependencies, with insights on rapid development and user adoption strategies.

Findings

Enabled understanding of service consumption across the company

Supported data-driven decision making for service management

Facilitated service retirement planning and organizational insights

Abstract

Managing dependencies between software services is a crucial task for any company operating cloud applications. Visualizations can help to understand and maintain these complex dependencies. In this paper, we present a force-directed service dependency visualization and filtering tool that has been developed and used within SAP. The tool's use cases include guiding service retirement as well as understanding service deployment landscapes and their relationship to the company's organizational structure. We report how we built and adapted the tool under strict time constraints to address the requirements of our users. We further share insights on how we enabled internal adoption. For us, starting with a minimal viable visualization and then quickly responding to user feedback was essential for convincing users of the tool's value. The final version of the tool enabled users to visually understand company-wide service consumption, supporting data-driven decision making.