The Ubiquity of Queues
Queues are one of the most common components used to organize. Everything from software processes, tasks, to people need to "Get in line". Does it have a higher priority? You might be at the front of the line. No matter what the queue strategy we have them everywhere.
Visualizing Queues Today
We don't often associate data visualization with queues specifically. We just have common tools that we occasionally apply. Most commonly it's not a visualization at all it's a data table that can be filtered and sorted. Occasionally we see a line chart for queue length over time. Both of these make sense for certain use cases but have limitations in scale and context that are rarely solved.
Throughput combination chart
This is a decent high level view to understand the overall progress of queue. Are more items coming in than going out. I wouldn't change this chart for what it does. It's intuitive and serves a common purpose. The only improvements would be from allowing drill downs into anything more specific to understand what's stuck, what came in and why

Cycle time Histogram (bar chart)
I'm not a fan of this one. There isn't much here to make decisions from. There's no way to know why. You have to ingest and correlate a lot of various views to get the context you need.

Heatmap Grid
I'm really impressed that this team created separate data visualizations specifically for Queues. It's intuitive and data dense. You can understand the queue volume from a high level in a small area allowing you to correlate with other visualizations

Credit: Simul8 Queue Visualization
Context is Key
A universal solution isn't a very good one: I had a dream of creating the most amazing universal queue visualization for all use cases, and I quickly woke up. I talked to a lot of people I respect and did some research only to realize the obvious: Everyone needs to get something different from a queue depending on their role and what's in the queue. This led me to focus on what I know, software engineering and managing development tasks. There are definitely areas of overlap between what I came up with specifically for development tasks, but I had to start somewhere on a real world application.
Different "simple" perspectives: This was my second realization. That every role has a simple view that they care about, but many of them are different. A product manager will typically need to see an overall value to effort matrix, but a customer service manager will focus on customer value and feature specific timelines. Each focus in an organization has different perspectives and at the top level they all need to be considered, correlated, prioritized and resolved onto an inclusive plan. This view across multiple perspectives that can be compared requires a normalization of what's used across them.

