Visualizing Progress

Data visualization gets (from me) a bad rap, because so often it is used as a way to make fundamentally unsexy things just sexy enough for management to buy, without reference to whether the item in question is, at core, useful or effective.

Caveat aside, this graph from the GeoTools JIRA side made my hair stand on end.

Yikes, do you close more tickets than get opened? There’s a visualization that lights a fire under my butt!

Even when I’m in full ticket-hunting-mode I feel like I sometimes am not making forward progress, since Regina gets into bug-finding-mode and starts opening them up on me faster. And the last year of adding features to PostGIS (raster, topology) while altering core structures (serialization, indexes) has created an avalanche of tickets. More than fits on a page. Time to get closing!