Monday 30 March 2015

Need for Visualisation

The idea of an evolving solution to a problem is a great one, but how do we sell it to non technical people and how do we show them the progress we are making and the avenues of investigation we are trying?  Its difficult to explain that the mutation and breeding operators we tried in the last two posts have not had the desired effect without being able to explain the quantification of the fitness we are using.  The best way to convey any complex idea is with pictures, so I am looking to create a graphical display of the evolution process, or at least the numeric results of each generation, so a side-by-side comparison of the process can be seen when an operator is changed, or the fitness evaluation is changed as we will look to do in a few posts time.

Due to time constraints I have not managed to get a working system to display these results in a way that I would like, so I am not including the details in this post, but they will come soon.

The problem of describing a problem like the one we are attempting to solve is always going to be a difficult one, and is just one example of the difficulty in communicating within a multidisciplinary environment.  Not only do we have managers that need results, and want detailed explanations of timescales to get results with tangible progress indicators; we need to ensure that the needs of the system as outlined by business analysts are understood by devs and testers alike, and that end users can be provided with useful documentation, and, and, and.  The channels are endless, and that brings its own problems.  I will be looking at this set of problems in either this blog or a sister blog soon, and I will provide a link if necessary when it comes about.

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