The thing about software is that it’s remarkably easy to write a program that mostly works. And it’s difficult to tell the difference between a quick hack and a stable, reliable, and robust system, because the software development process produces almost no visible artifacts.

When you look at a building, it’s easy to get a quick sense of how well-built it is. Which of the two buildings below would you rather be in during a heavy storm?

Besides the program itself, the only visible artifact of the software development process is the source code. And that is only viewed by the programmers, through the tiny lens of the text editor. What if we could make the entire process more visible?

I’m thinking of visualizations along the lines of the comparison of system calls in Linux/Apache and Windows/IIS that I posted a while back. But this is just one idea. What other ways could we visualize Code Smells? (Maybe we could actually smell them!)

Aside from visualizing various aspects of the source code itself, could we show how well tested a piece of software is? We could show how many tests were run recently, what their results were, how good the code coverage is, the number of crashes encountered in the field, etc. With projectors and LCD displays being so cheap these days, there’s no reason a development team couldn’t have a few displays dedicated to these kinds of visualizations.

What do you think? Could this help improve the quality of software? What if companies openly published these kinds of things?

Looks like Windows 7 is going to have a bunch of interesting new task management features. (Of course, Microsoft has been pulling the ol’ bait-and-switch on things like since Memphis…we’ll see what actually ships.) The taskbar is getting a complete overhaul: thumbnails and “Jump Lists” look cool. Window management is changing as well; I especially like the ability to dock a window on one half of the screen.

Even if you’re not a Windows user, major new features like this will no doubt influence other platforms.

Engineering Windows 7: The Taskbar

Seeing the Ars article on Windows 7 reminded me about this post that I saw a while back. It sets the context for some of the new task management features. The most interesting part is seeing the statistics on what features of the taskbar are actually used, how many windows people typically have open, etc. This is a bit like the kind of data I’m hoping to collect with my tabbed browsing study.

Why Windows is less secure than Linux

This is brilliant. A graphical visualization of system calls in IIS/Windows vs. Apache/Linux. Full size images: IIS, Apache. (via Greg Wilson & Visual Complexity)

Cruz – A Social Browser for Mac OS X Leopard

Cruz is a new WebKit-based browser written by Todd Ditchendorf, the creator of Fluid. Some cool features: multi-pane browsing, a plugin API, Greasemonkey support, built-in TinyURL support. It’s only at 0.1 now, but I’ll be keeping my eye on this.

For years Amazon’s interface showed the average review, so viewers could tell the general mood surrounding a book. If it was a 5 star or a 1 star book, then that would be instantly recognizable.

But over time it became clear that the rating system had a fault: if the average rating was somewhere in the middle, say 3.5 stars, it was unclear whether it was just a dull book that most people rated as mediocre or if it was a polarizing book that half the people rated 5 and half the people rated 1. A political book, for example, usually polarizes.

The solution they came up with is a graphic that shows not only the average review, but also the distribution:

I like the new visualization, but I still find that the meaning doesn’t really jump out at me. I have to really concentrate for a few seconds to grok the graphic.

I just ran across another take on this problem. David Abbet points to a much simpler solution:

Instead of using stars, Summize displays color bars which summarize the reviews: the more green, the more positive they are. Where stars only give an average rating, those color bars really add some depth to the information.

I like it. Much easier to understand at first glance, I think. And as swissmiss points out, it’s cool that both their logo and their favicon reflect the style of the color bars.

Elastic lists are a technique for browsing multi-faceted data structures. A multi-faceted data structure is one that is structured by several different attributes — in this example, Nobel Prize winners are grouped by the area (physics, chemistry, etc.), nationality and gender of the winner, and year. What I really like about this visualization is how the relative weights of each of the metadata values are represented by the size of the box. You can see in the image above that the box for male is much bigger than the box for female, indicating that there have been more male winners of the Nobel Prize in physics.

The technique is similar to the now-ubiquitous tag cloud (an example from Flickr above), but I like the approach from Elastic Lists better, because it’s more subtle. I find that some tag clouds tend to punch you in the face with the main terms, but this approach gives the words themselves equal footing, while still providing some useful secondary information.