#6 metric color/bar graph coding in the HTML report

[Vlad Roubtsov]

People seem to want jcoverage-like red/green bar
images/graphs in the HTML report.

Options that were discussed are:

- a separate column just for images. This will make the
report very wide.
- color-code each data cell's background (according to
the metric value)
- overlay metric numbers on top of red/green images
- place red/green images below metric numbers within
each cell. This will probably make the report very tall.

I think a truly innovative HCI idea is needed here to
make it all work very naturally.

[Jamie Flournoy]

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First, I think that stacking the text and bar graphs
vertically would be better than making the report really
wide. At least that way you could see all of the data for
each line-item (package / class / method) in the report at
once, and you'd only have to scroll when you wanted to see
each of the other lines at that level. For a higher level
grasp of that data, just hit the back button to go up a
level and see the aggregate data.

The advantage of the JCoverage bar graph approach in my
opinion is that not only can you see good vs. bad, but you
can very quickly see relative amounts of coverage, i.e.
which lines in the report are best off, which are worst off,
etc. Color coding the cell background probably wouldn't
achieve that. It would be an improvement over just color
coding the text red vs. black, but a bar graph / thermometer
bar approach would convey even more information.

Also, JCoverage's bar graphs are placed beside the text, so
there's no reason not to make them as tall as the text.
However, in a vertical arrangement, the bars could be only
two or three pixels tall and still be easily visible. So the
added height of doing it that way wouldn't be that bad.

Another possiblity would be to make the reports configurable
- let the user decide what subset of % value, exact count,
and bar graph they want. Turn them all on by default but if
somebody really hates how tall or wide the report is, they
could turn something off.

[Ryan Bloom]

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I have created a patch to add the red and green bar graphs.
It isn't as clean as I would like it to be, but it does
work. The colors are pretty bad, because I'm not very good
at picking good colors, so I suggest changing the default
colors. The CSS may not be perfect either, but it does work
in all of my tests.

The patch can be found at:

http://rkbloom.net/rbb/graphs.patch

because I can't attach a file to this bug report.
Long-term, I would like to make the graphs optional when
creating the reports, but I haven't looked into how hard
that would be yet.

[Kurt]

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I agree that some more graphical feedback would be a nice
touch. The detailed numbers are necessary, but a quick
glance at a bar graph or pie chart would really be easy on the
eyes of a new user. (It couldn't hurt your Marketing either.)

Kurt from Florida

[Grzegorz Lukasik]

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It is small but very important thing. Many users will not
choose EMMA becouse there are no red/green bars. I am serious.

[rico_g]

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I absolutely agree with the previous post. Having red/green
bars can make the difference! I'm currently evaluating EMMA
vs JCoverage for a large (~500K LOC) project. Emma is so
easy to use, I love it. However I also really like the
visual feedback of JCoverage reports.

I will probably vote in favour for Emma, hoping to see some
green bars in the future ;-)

Thanks,
Rico.