Slicing and Visualizing F’ Topologies with F’Prism

As the barriers to entry in the aerospace industry continue to decrease, software engineering techniques are increasingly being integrated into spaceflight software development methods. F’, an open-source software framework developed by JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory), leverages component-based architectures with a strict, fine-grained, and explicit declaration of components with typed ports, fostering compile-time correctness guarantees, modularity, and reusability. However, such declaration inevitably increases architectural complexity, leading to potential pitfalls in understandability of such component-based architectures and maintainability of systems built using F’. To mitigate the aforementioned problem, this paper presents F’Prism, an open-source tool that incorporates automated architecture slicing into topology visualization by employing three architecture-general and three spaceflight-specific slicing criteria tailored for F’ architectures. Our observation shows architecture slicing has potential to improve visualization and comprehension of such complex, critical software architectures.