[hyades-dev] Hyades UI meeting minutes

["Curtis D'Entremont" <curtispd@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Meeting notes from this week's Hyades
UI meeting: 

Topics: 
1. Reworking of sequence diagrams to be more consistent with other Hyades
views.
2. Marius' suggestion for an alternative
to the <--Summary--> root item in statistics tables.

Attendees: 
Dominique Guilbaud
Curtis d'Entremont
Eugene Chan
Wayne Ho
Andrew Kaye-Cheveldayoff
Marius Slavescu
Alex Nan

Time: 
Wednesday, Aug. 11, 12:00pm (noon) EST. 

Notes: 
The problem seems to be that the sequence
diagrams and statistical table views are at both extremes of the spectrum;
we have a wide array of tables for all purposes, yet only one sequence
diagram for a wide array of purposes. We want to reach a happy medium between
these two extremes, with both the statistics view and the sequence diagrams.
The earlier proposed simplification of the statistics views will do this;
now we are focusing on the sequence diagrams.

The general consensus was to have two
sequence diagram views. One for log interactions, and another for trace
interactions. Trace is perhaps not a very good name; we need to consider
alternatives. Each view will have different levels of information; for
log interactions we will have the log level and the thread level. For trace,
we will have 6 levels: host, process, agent, thread, class, object. This
means having 6 toolbar buttons in the trace sequence diagram view in addition
to the existing ones; a suggestion was put forth to remove the agent interactions
as it is arguably the lest valuable. To be investigated further whether
this is the right thing to do.

As for the open-with menu, we decided
that, at least for now, we will keep things the way they are and show all
the different levels of interactions. This is certainly debatable; we want
to make sure the user knows about, say, the object interaction view; the
user may never discover it if it is not explicitly shown in the menu.

Another feature which was discussed
is the drill down capability in the sequence diagram. This would be in
addition to the toolbar buttons for each level. For example, the user may
want to right click on a host and drill down. This would be different than
the toolbar action to go to the lower level, as it would filter out everything
that is not in the selected host. This would apply to every level. A request
will be opened in bugzilla for this. Alex also suggested a similar thing
for the log interactions; to focus only on a certain group of correlated
records. To be considered in the future.

As for the totals in the statistics
view, it was decided that it would be better to have a row/item/something
always show the totals instead of whatever is selected. The filtering capability
needs to be improved for these tables, and when the user filters out what
he/she doesn't want to see, the totals will show the sum of only those
things which are not filtered. As for the type of widget to use for the
totals, this was not decided. The more immediate concern is the filtering.

Thanks,
Curtis d'Entremont
Problem Determination Tools
IBM Toronto Lab

Phone: (905) 413-5754
E-Mail: curtispd@xxxxxxxxxx