I have gotten the opportunity to work with Lattix in the past. I believe the paradigm it represents (a hierarchical dependency matrix) is the future of large-scale system architecture management.
However the companies I work for are always put off by the price tag. Is anyone aware of any good open-source alternatives that exist? After much searching I can't seem to find one.
There are some open source tools that implement the core functionality of Lattix, DSM (Design or Dependency Structure Matrix) listed here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency%5FStructure%5FMatrix
The recent release of dtangler 2.0 has an something in its release notes you might find interesting:
dtangler 2.0.0. is released! The major new feature is the ability to read dependency information from a plaintext file. In other words: it's not just for java - now you can generate a dependency structure matrix that describes whatever you want!
There's always JDepend. And if you have some budget, we offer Structure101 at $600, and its free to use on open source projects.
It is not a free tool (299 euros for a personnal license) but NDepend comes with a dependency graph coupled with a dependency matrix. You can try NDepend straight on your code thanks to a Free Trial Edition. See screenshoots extracted from this blog post: Interactive Code Dependencies Graph
