Looking for ideas on how to display data on Files and Changelists/Bugs associated with them.

Question

Title says mainly the problem. On my spare time for our group at school, I've written something to parse our p4 submissions and the files associated with each changelist.

I've then created a tree structure and each file has a list of all the changelists and ones that pertain to bugs associated with them.

I'm looking for awesome ideas on meaningful ways to display the data.

Currently I've thought of:

1. Pie chart of files with largest changelists (display only those past a certain threshold)
2. Histogram

The problem is tons of files have only 1-2 submissions....

Is there even a great way of showing this data?

Answer 1

I would mock up sample data in Excel, and then play with charts and graphs right there in Excel. When you have a model that you like, you can focus on writing a program to display the data like that, or perhaps you'll like Excel so much that you'll just import the data into Excel (ODBC, CSV file, etc..). If you have lots of data, Excel's "pivot table" feature is very helpful, btw. I use it to analyze millions of rows of performance data (much too big to actually load into Excel cells, but it's a snap for the pivot table to crunch a .csv and consolidate).