facesdepend

Facesdepend is a framework and library for modeling and analyzing dependencies in modular software systems by representing components as faces within a shared polyhedral structure. The core idea is to treat each functional element as a facet, enabling dependency relationships to be expressed as geometric adjacencies and constraints. The approach supports reasoning about compatibility, version constraints, and impact analysis in complex deployments.

The library provides data structures for components, constraints, and edges; a constraint solver; and utilities for converting software manifest data into a polyhedral dependency model. It supports import from common package managers and can export to graph formats for visualization. The design emphasizes composability, making it possible to combine multiple dependency perspectives, such as runtime, build, or organizational policies.

Facesdepend originated as a research concept in software architecture and was released as an open-source project in 2022 by a distributed team. It is distributed under an open-source MIT license. The project is maintained by volunteers and corporate contributors, with periodic releases and accompanying documentation.

In practice, facesdepend is used to perform impact analysis, what-if planning, and to visualize dependency surfaces to identify cycles, incompatible combinations, and critical components. It aims to improve transparency in dependency decision-making and to support tooling in release engineering, architecture reviews, and compliance checks.