Abstract
IT systems are fundamentally dynamic objects, yet we try to understand them via static representations. Computer systems are quite capable of generating dynamic representations of ongoing computations. Every IT system executes in the context of an operating system which can execute other programs at the same time. The power of the human visual system can be exploited to aid IT system understanding via dynamic system-visualization techniques. The related idea of visual programming is also introduced.
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- 1.
Computer gaming and IT systems such as Flight Simulators have seen the most development of audio and tactile communication with computer systems, but it has not contributed significantly to development or maintenance of IT systems.
- 2.
In the 1995 addition to his 1975 classic, The Mythical Man-Month (Addison-Wesley), Brooks dips briefly into the possibility of improving the efficiency of software production through visualization. He maintains that programs are “inherently unvisualizable”(p. 186) because they are “not inherently embedded in space” and hence have “no ready representation in the same way that land has maps, silicon chips have diagrams” etc. (p. 185).
This argument does not seem unchallengeable: visualization will not suddenly reveal all desired aspects of program structure, but surely a well-crafted visualization can reveal some useful aspects?
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© 2011 Springer-Verlag London Limited
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Partridge, D. (2011). Watching Programs Work. In: The Seductive Computer. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84996-498-2_21
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84996-498-2_21
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