Stratify

Stratify is a tool for exploring and improving architecture of software. Discover bits of Stratified Design that are hiding in your code. Gain big picture understanding to make better decisions how to grow your system.

• Code maps - Visualize structure and dependencies of codebases, supports following sources:
  • Clojure/Script code
  • Graphviz - Interactive visualization of outputs produced by other tools
    (e.g. Go, JavaSript/TypeScript dependencies or others)
  • Architecture maps - Explore C4 models
• Metrics reports - Calculate code metrics and generate visual reports
• Architecture checks - Enforce architectural constrains, dependency rules, layer violations

For visualization it leverages the code map tool from Visual Studio, which is designed for hierarchical graphs, and allows to interactively collapse or expand the amount of shown information.

This is an advantage over static graph rendering tools like Graphviz which only work for trivial sized graphs, because for a size of systems encountered in practice it becomes a tangle of lines. That is overwhelming and does not aid much in understanding the structure.

The code map tool in Visual Studio uses DGML, which is an XML-based format for representing directed graphs. Visualizing a codebase is a two step process:

1. First, this tool reads Clojure code and outputs a DGML graph.
2. Then the graph is loaded and visualized using the DGML Editor in Visual Studio.

Watch the demo video which shows several use cases:

• Big picture understanding - Explore a codebase top-down to gain insights about the system structure.
• Local understanding - Navigate and traverse the call graph to learn details about implementation.
• Refactoring simulation - Improve structure of a codebase by previewing results of refactoring.

Watch the London Clojurians talk that goes into depth and also dicusses software architecture in general:

Usage

First extract DGML graph from source code.

Use without installing

clojure -Sdeps '{:deps{io.github.dundalek/stratify{:git/tag"v0.2.0":git/sha"85fcdee"}}}' \
        -M -m stratify.main

Install by adding alias

~/.clojure/deps.edn to :aliases section

{:aliases
 {:stratify
  {:extra-deps {io.github.dundalek/stratify {:git/tag "v0.2.0" :git/sha "85fcdee"}}
   :main-opts ["-m" "stratify.main"]

Then run:

clojure -M:stratify path/to/src -o graph.dgml

Troubleshooting

Stratify needs Clojure 1.12. In case you get an error Could not locate clojure/repl/deps__init.class:

• Make sure to update Clojure CLI tools to latest version (clojure --version should print Clojure CLI version 1.12.0.1479 or later).
• Alternatively add org.clojure/clojure {:mvn/version "1.12.0"} to :deps map explicitly.

Details

Full error message:

Execution error (FileNotFoundException) at stratify.main/eval138$loading (main.clj:1).
Could not locate clojure/repl/deps__init.class, clojure/repl/deps.clj or clojure/repl/deps.cljc on classpath.

~/.clojure/deps.edn :aliases section with added Clojure 1.12:

{:aliases
 {:stratify
  {:extra-deps {io.github.dundalek/stratify {:git/tag "v0.2.0" :git/sha "85fcdee"}
                org.clojure/clojure {:mvn/version "1.12.0"}}
   :main-opts ["-m" "stratify.main"]

Options

Usage: stratify <options> <src-paths>

Options:
  -o, --out                  <file>   -   Output file, default "-" standard output
  -f, --from                 <format> clj Source format, choices: "clj", "dot", "overarch"
      --flat-namespaces                   Render flat namespaces instead of a nested hierarchy
      --include-dependencies              Include links to library dependencies
      --metrics                           Calculate and serve namespace metrics report
  -h, --help                              Print this help message and exit

Using Visual Studio DGML Editor

Once you extracted the graph use Visual Studio to visualize it.

A downside is that Visual Studio is Windows-only, but it can be run in a Virtual Machine (VM) and there are VM images provided for developers. It is sufficient to use the free Community edition.

• Run Visual Studio in VM (optional)
  • VM images for developers in various formats, e.g. for VirtualBox
  • Visual Studio 2022 Community edition is pre-installed
• Enable DGML Editor
  • menu Tools -> Get Tools and Features (opens Visual Studio Installer) -> Individual Components
    • check DGML Editor
• Install DgmlPowerTools 2022 extension (source, optional)
  • provides extra features like neighborhood and butterfly exploration modes
  • menu Extensions -> Manage Extensions

Graphviz visualization

To convert Graphviz .dot format to DGML pass the -f dot option:

clojure -M:stratify graph.dot -f dot -o graph.dgml

By default nested hierarchy is created based on segments using / as separator.
Pass the --flat-namespaces option for flat nodes without nesting.

Extract Go dependencies as Graphviz dot file

Use goda to extract dependency graph, which is then converted to DGML.

go install github.com/loov/goda@latest

From within a Go project:

goda graph "./..." > graph.dot

Or to also include dependencies:

goda graph "./:all" > graph-all.dot

Compare the legibility of a typical graphviz dependency graph to the same graph displayed as hierarchical on the right. Note that groups can be further collapsed using the interactive viewer.

JavaScript/TypeScript dependencies visualization

Use Dependency cruiser to extract JS/TS dependencies as Graphviz dot file:

bunx depcruise src --include-only "^src" --output-type dot > graph.dot

To also include dependencies:

bunx depcruise src --output-type dot > graph.dot

Architecture maps

View C4 architecture models expressed in Overarch format.

When a model becomes large it can end up overwhelming. Overarch lets you choose upfront which parts of your model to render as static diagrams. However, it can be useful to see the entire model at once, explore it interactively, and drill down to areas of interest as needed.

To convert an architecture model to DGML use the -f overarch option and pass the model directory:

clojure -M:stratify models/banking -f overarch -o banking.dgml

Here is a rendering of the example banking model:

Metrics reports

Use the --metrics option to calculate code metrics for given source paths and generate a report. Clerk is used to start a local web server which renders a notebook as a web page. Metrics and charts can be adapted by customizing the notebook.clj.

clojure -M:stratify src --metrics

Use the -o / --out to generate the report as a HTML file. It can be useful to run periodically on CI and upload the HTML report to a static hosting server.

clojure -M:stratify src --metrics -o report.html

Architecture checks

The goal is to be able to define rules for code like architectural constraints, dependency rules, and layer violations. It is inspired by ArchUnit with a difference of using graph queries (Datalog) aiming to be mostly programming language agnostic and only needing thin adapters.

Currently, the feature is not ready yet. There is a work-in-progress namespace queries.clj used for experiments in the REPL to demonstrate the approach. The result from code analysis is loaded into in-memory DataScript database and queries to check code rules run against it. Future work will be to try to express various rules, identify common patterns, and create more concise helpers.

About DGML

DGML stands for Directed Graph Markup Language

• Watch Overview Video of the features and how to use the editor showcasing examples.
• For more details see Reference and XSD Schema.

Available renderers:

• DGML editor in Visual Studio 2022, Windows-only (recommended)
• DGMLViewer plugin for Visual Studio Code, cross-platform
  • only viewer, no editing
  • does not seem to work very well, many examples cannot be opened