Greetings all,
I've been thinking about the following two ideas for a while, and thought I'd throw them
out for general consumption. Cedric: do not despair: these are "post-Ph.D. thesis"
enhancements :-)
I. Google Map-style Telemetry
The user interaction with google maps is quite nifty: you can click-drag the map image to
move around in the map, and you can zoom in or out using a slider.
Imagine a telemetry report where you don't specify the Interval: it displays a Telemetry
"map" at a default grain-size (say, Weeks), and a default number of weeks (say, the last
six weeks). You can zoom in (to days) or zoom out (to months, or years). You
click-drag to move the timeline back and forth.
This would be pretty cool for exploratory purposes. You might start at the 30,000 foot
level (i.e. months) and move around through the past couple of years of data, then when
you find something of interest, you "swoop down" to the week or day level to see what's
up.
II. Multi-project Telemetry
Currently, the Telemetry Report requires that you select a single Project. Imagine
instead that this was a selectable list. Then, you could do things like compare the
trends of two or three or four Projects on a single chart.
For extra credit, supply an "alignment" option. What this would do is tell the charting
mechanism to add an "offset" in days to all of the data for the specified project. The
reason for this is to allow you to compare project data from projects that occurred at
different times. Let's say, for example, that Project Foo went from Jan-June 2003, and
Project Bar went from July-December 2004. You are interested in comparing the "shape" of
the telemetry for, say, open issues, for the two projects. The problem is that if you
chart these two projects, the trend lines will show up in different regions of the
chart--you need a way to "shift" Project Foo forward six months in time so that its start
date aligns with the start date for Project Bar.
III. Multi-Project Google Map-style Telemetry
Now put I and II together. We could enhance our "Google Telemetry Map" with an
additional interface control similar to the way google maps has the
"Map-Satellite-Hybrid" control to overlay images. But in our case, the user interface
control would list your current projects and allow you to selectively "overlay"
telemetry data from muliple projects on the same chart.
OK, enough Friday Morning DayDreaming. Back to work on 7.3.
Cheers,
Philip
