Back-annotation of entity-relationship diagrams to represent data access

Next year I will be presenting the results of my M.Sc. research project. The topic in which I will be working during the next months will be the:

1. Design and evaluation of of different ways to back-annotate entity-relationship diagrams with run-time information.
2. Development of a tool to automatically produce the back-annotated entity-relationship diagrams associated to requests served by a Django site.

During the next months the design of some candidate static notations (not requiring animation, therefore easy to draw by hand) will have the higher priority. Then, those notations will be tested with users to evaluate them. Finally, after we get results of which information of the run-time execution will be useful and how it should be represent, the development will start …

Hopefully the results of this research project will be applied to:

1. Help new developers of a project to understand the design of a database driven software.
2. Debug (and maybe track the performance of) a database driven software.

Thanks to Greg Wilson, Jordi Cabot, Robert Clarisó Viladrosa and Mike Conley for the first talks about this topic. This will be my second time working in a thesis project and I think I will enjoy this experience a lot.