A Quote from Marian Petre

From Marian Petre’s recent paper “Mental imagery and software visualization in high-performance software development teams”:

…even in debugging and comprehension, the experts relied more on their own systematic practices than on visualizations—and their use of available visualizations related to how directly the visualizations supported their practices. Tools which simply re-presented available information, which failed to provide forms of abstraction or selection, or which embodied assumptions at odds with the experts' practices were discarded. Take-up was extremely low in the context of design and generation. The exception was for general tools such as MATLAB, which allowed software developers to realize their own visualizations—in effect for visualization-builders rather than visualizations per se…(Please note that 'Not invented here' was never offered as a reason not to use a tool.)