Managing software with new visual representations

Abstract

Managing large projects is a very challenging task requiring the tracking and scheduling of many resources. Although new technologies have made it possible to automatically collect data on project resources, it is very difficult to access this data because of its size and lack of structure. We present three novel glyphs for simplifying this process and apply them to visualizing statistics from a multi-million line software project. These glyphs address four important needs in project management: viewing time dependent data; managing large data volumes; dealing with diverse data types; and correspondence of data to real-world concepts.