Visualisations

• Experience of the group on visualisation: most people used Mondrian
• How to convince people of your visualisation? How to know if your visualisation is sensible?
• Reference: Show Me Numbers
• Are graphs the correct representation for software visualisations?
• Who uses their own visualisation? Johan explains that he used a visualisation to identify all overriders of a particular method by combining querying and visualisations.
• Need for more emphasis on why a visualisation is useful.
• Ethical code for visualisations: visualisations should be based on sound, basic principles (e.g. psychological effect)
• Features we want from visualisation engines: performance, hierarchical presentation (do not show everything at once, make it expandable), highly interactive scripting, make it interactive, fancy basic images (e.g. splines), advanced layout (something like Pic), rich set of shapes and layout algorithms, Cairo back-end, querying the visualisation, different metaphors, composition of visualisations, different outputs (screen, pdf, web, ...), debugging.
• Explorative visualisation (without knowing the structure of the visualisation up front) versus deciding on a structure up front.
• Use of animation in visualisations.
• Convincing people by thinking about their problems.
• Doru: use visualisations to find out new information (e.g. changes)
• Michael: visualisations for comprehension
• Idea of Johan: visualising traces
• Alex: important to always show the visualisation. Not really useful if developer has to explicitly ask for it.
• Other frameworks than Mondrian: SWAG-kit (Rick Holt), yED, GC(?), GNU Plot (Abram uses this as a first exploratory tool for some of his experiments)