A software developer's guide to informal evaluation of Visual Analytics environments using VAST Challenge information

The VAST Challenge has been a popular venue for academic and industry participants for over ten years. Many participants comment that the majority of their time in preparing VAST Challenge entries is discovering elements in their software environments that need to be redesigned in order to solve the given task. Fortunately, there is no need to wait until the VAST Challenge is announced to test out software systems. The Visual Analytics Benchmark Repository contains all past VAST Challenge tasks, data, solutions and submissions. In this poster we describe how developers can perform informal evaluations of various aspects of their visual analytics environments using VAST Challenge information.