The War Room Command Console: Shared Visualizations for Inclusive Team Coordination

Making the structure of software visible during system development helps (i) build a shared understanding of the context for each piece of work, (ii) identify progress with implementation, and (iii) highlight any conflict between individual development activities. Finding an adequate representation for such information is not straightforward, especially for large applications. This paper describes an implementation of such a visualization system designed to explore some of the issues involved. The approach is based on a ‘War Room Command Console’ metaphor and uses a bank of eight linked consoles to present information. The tool was applied to several industrial software systems written in a mixture of Java, C++ and C, one of which was over a million lines of code in size.