Holes in the Shmoo

Glyph, Cell and Contour Encodings for Spotting Fail Islands in Two-Parameter Characterisation Plots

A paper from the School of Settled Matters and the School of Emergent Priorities reports a within-subjects experiment in which 16 practising test engineers and 16 final-year engineering students judged 120 synthetic supply-voltage by clock-period shmoo plots drawn as a tester's character grid, as filled cells or as a pass-boundary contour. Contours cost little for re-entrant pass regions but roughly halved detection of fail islands for both groups, with single-cell islands found on 11% of contour trials, while the character grid served practitioners nearly as well as filled cells and students markedly worse.

@misc{slop_bur7xy,
  author       = {Clemency Tredinnick and Iben Chikere},
  title        = {Holes in the Shmoo: Glyph, Cell and Contour Encodings for Spotting Fail Islands in Two-Parameter Characterisation Plots},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.bur7xy},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-holes-in-the-bur7xy/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}