On Sunday, I will give a keynote at the IEEE Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT). This is the premier research venue in the area of software visualization. It’s a real honor especially given that I have officially left the academic research world quite a number of years ago.

I will have 90 minutes to make a point, and mine will be that visualizations should become pervasive in software development. Ok, given the audience, that should not be to be too hard to convey. The more tricky part will be to show why it did not happen until now, and what we can do to change that state of facts.

To lay out the basic arguments, Andrei and I wrote a short paper on Pervasive software visualization. In short, we argue that the development environment has to change radically to allow for a natural inclusion of visualizations in regular development workflows. To this end, the IDE has to become moldable and programmable. Essentially, this direction is based on the humane assessment philosophy of empowering the developer to craft contextual tools. We exemplify this direction with our work on the Glamorous Toolkit.