Visual Is Bad

I'd like to warn against the false transparency of visual tools in general. Most often, they result in fact in real opacity, i.e. in a discontinuity of the chain of possible representations, ending at a human-only interface. The result is to replace semi-conductors with flesh: to make SCM (i.e. tool supported management of information) impossible.

It is thus better to produce the information in a textual format (which can be parsed, maybe grepped... xml is often overkill and more challenging), and only next, to represent it graphically. This, one can do in a generic (independent from the semantics of the data) way, e.g. in perl (there are good modules to easily produce all kinds of charts).

The point is that one should try to avoid breaking the access to the specific outputs of different tools. This is especially true of build tools. 'Build tool' is not a well-defined category, the members of which would be interchangeable.

This is the area in which ClearCase shines with its management of derived objects, allowing you to compare existing DOs through their dependency trees. When available, such functionality ought to be exposed.

-- MarcGirod - 15 May 2008