Article

Let's go to the whiteboard: how and why software developers use drawings

Authors:

Mauro Cherubini,

Amy J. KoAuthors Info & Claims

CHI '07: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Pages 557 - 566

https://doi.org/10.1145/1240624.1240714

Published: 29 April 2007 Publication History

Abstract

Software developers are rooted in the written form of their code, yet they often draw diagrams representing their code. Unfortunately, we still know little about how and why they create these diagrams, and so there is little research to inform the design of visual tools to support developers' work. This paper presents findings from semi-structured interviews that have been validated with a structured survey. Results show that most of the diagrams had a transient nature because of the high cost of changing whiteboard sketches to electronic renderings. Diagrams that documented design decisions were often externalized in these temporary drawings and then subsequently lost. Current visualization tools and the software development practices that we observed do not solve these issues, but these results suggest several directions for future research.

References

[1]

M. W. Alibali, M. Bassok, K. O. Solomon, S. E. Syc, and S. Goldin-Meadow. Illuminating mental representation through speech and gesture. Psychological Science, 10:327--333, 1999.

[2]

V. Bellotti and S. Bly. Walking away from the desktop computer: Distributed collaboration and mobility in a product design team. In Proc. CSCW, pp. 209--218.

Digital Library

[3]

M. Cherubini and J. van der Pol. Grounding is not shared understanding: Distinguishing grounding at an utterance and knowledge level. In CONTEXT 2005.

[4]

H. H. Clark and E. F. Shaeffer. Contributing to discourse. Cognitive Science, 13:259--294, 1989.

[5]

U. Dekel. Supporting distributed software design meetings: What can we learn from co-located meetings? In Proc. HSSE 2005. ACM.

Digital Library

[6]

P. Dillenbourg, D. Traum, and D. Schneider. Grounding in multi-modal task-oriented collaboration. In Proc. EUROAIED 1996, pp. 415--425.

[7]

E. Do and M. D. Gross. Reasoning about cases with diagrams. In J. Vanegas and P. Chinowsky, editors, ASCE, pp. 314--320, 1996.

[8]

S. Goldin-Meadow. Hearing gesture: How our hands help us think. Belknap Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, 2003.

[9]

J. Heiser, B. Tversky, and M. Silverman. Visual and spatial reasoning in design III, chapter Sketches for and from collaboration, pp. 69--78. 2004.

[10]

K. Henderson. On Line and On Paper: Visual Representations, Visual Culture, and Computer Graphics in Design Engineering. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.

Digital Library

[11]

J. D. Herbsleb. Metaphorical representation in collaborative software engineering. In Proc. WACC 1999, pp. 117--126. ACM.

Digital Library

[12]

M. Hertzum and A. M. Pejtersen. The information seeking practices of engineers: Searching for documents as well as for people. Information Processing and Management, 36(5):761--778, 2000.

Digital Library

[13]

E. Hutchins. Cognition in the Wild. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, 1995.

[14]

A.J. Ko, H.H. Aung, B.A. Myers (2005), Eliciting Design Requirements for Maintenance-Oriented IDEs: A Detailed Study of Corrective and Perfective Maintenance Tasks, In Proc. ICSE 2005. ACM.

Digital Library

[15]

J. H. Larkin and H. Simon. Why a diagram is (sometimes) worth ten thousand words. Cognitive Science, pages 65--99, 1987.

[16]

T. D. LaToza, G. Venolia, and R. DeLine. Maintaining mental models: a study of developer work habits. In ICSE '06: Proc ICSE 2006, pp. 492--501. ACM.

Digital Library

[17]

D. W. McDonald and M. S. Ackerman. Just talk to me: A field study of expertise location. In Proc. CSCW 1998, pp. 315--324.

Digital Library

[18]

D. E. Perry, N. A. Staudenmayer, and L. G. Votta. People, organizations and process improvement. IEEE Software, pages 36--45, July 1994.

Digital Library

[19]

B. A. Price, R. M. Baecker, and I.S. Small. A Principled Taxonomy of Software Visualization. Journal of Visual Languages and Computing, 4(3):211--266, 1999.

[20]

M. Suwa, J. Gero, and T. Purcell. Unexpected discoveries and s-invention of design requirements: Improving vehicles for a design process. Design Studies, 18(4):539--567, 2000.

[21]

B. Tversky, M. Suwa, M. Agrawala, H. J, C. Stolte, P. Hanrahan, D. Phan, J. Klingner, M. Daniel, P. Lee, and J. Haymaker. Human behavior in design: Individuals, teams, tools. In Sketches for Design and Design of Sketches, pp. 79--86. Springer, 2003.

[22]

B. Tversky. Spatial schemas and abstract thought. In Spatial Schemas in Depictions, pp. 79--111. MIT, 2001.

Cited By

Razzaq ABuckley JLai QYu TBotterweck G(2024)A Systematic Literature Review on the Influence of Enhanced Developer Experience on Developers' Productivity: Factors, Practices, and RecommendationsACM Computing Surveys10.1145/368729957:1(1-46)Online publication date: 7-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3687299
Hayatpur DHempel BChen KDuan WGuo PXia H(2024)Taking ASCII Drawings Seriously: How Programmers Diagram CodeProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642683(1-16)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3642683
Jackson VPrikladnicki Rvan der Hoek ARoychoudhury APaiva AAbreu RStorey M(2024)Co-Creation in Fully Remote Software TeamsProceedings of the IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3597503.3623297(1-12)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3597503.3623297
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Let's go to the whiteboard: how and why software developers use drawings

Recommendations

Sketches and diagrams in practice
FSE 2014: Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering

Sketches and diagrams play an important role in the daily work of software developers. In this paper, we investigate the use of sketches and diagrams in software engineering practice. To this end, we used both quantitative and qualitative methods. We ...
An approach and tool for synchronous refactoring of UML diagrams and models using model-to-model transformations
WRT '12: Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Refactoring Tools

When refactorings are applied to software models that are specified using the Unified Modeling Language (UML), the actual model and the graphical presentation of the model using a diagram need to be distinguished. While UML refactoring tools exist, they ...
Let's play: understanding the role and meaning of digital games in the lives of older adults
FDG '12: Proceedings of the International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games

Despite a marked increase in the use of digital games among older persons, there is a notable lack of research that provides insight into the gaming experiences of this population. A major demographic shift within the senior gaming market has ushered in ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

CHI '07: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

April 2007

1654 pages

ISBN:9781595935939

DOI:10.1145/1240624

General Chair:
Mary Beth Rosson
The Pennsylvania State University, USA
,
Program Chair:
David Gilmore
Intel, USA

Copyright © 2007 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 29 April 2007

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Article

Conference

CHI07

Sponsor:

CHI07: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

April 28 - May 3, 2007

California, San Jose, USA

Acceptance Rates

CHI '07 Paper Acceptance Rate 182 of 840 submissions, 22%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

Upcoming Conference

CHI 2025

Sponsor:
sigchi

ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

April 26 - May 1, 2025

Yokohama , Japan

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

162
Total Citations
View Citations
3,100
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)111
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)7

Reflects downloads up to 17 Jan 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Razzaq ABuckley JLai QYu TBotterweck G(2024)A Systematic Literature Review on the Influence of Enhanced Developer Experience on Developers' Productivity: Factors, Practices, and RecommendationsACM Computing Surveys10.1145/368729957:1(1-46)Online publication date: 7-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3687299
Hayatpur DHempel BChen KDuan WGuo PXia H(2024)Taking ASCII Drawings Seriously: How Programmers Diagram CodeProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642683(1-16)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3642683
Jackson VPrikladnicki Rvan der Hoek ARoychoudhury APaiva AAbreu RStorey M(2024)Co-Creation in Fully Remote Software TeamsProceedings of the IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3597503.3623297(1-12)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3597503.3623297
Štšpánek AKuťák DKozlíková BByška J(2024)Interactive Diagrams for Software Documentation2024 IEEE Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT)10.1109/VISSOFT64034.2024.00012(12-23)Online publication date: 6-Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/VISSOFT64034.2024.00012
Ražinskas MMiliūnas BJurgelaitis MČeponienė LBisikirskienė L(2024)Transforming Sketches of UML Use Case Diagrams to ModelsIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2024.3514455(1-1)Online publication date: 2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2024.3514455
de Andrade AJackson VPrikladnicki Rvan der Hoek A(2024)On meetings involving remote software teams: A systematic literature reviewInformation and Software Technology10.1016/j.infsof.2024.107541175(107541)Online publication date: Nov-2024
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2024.107541
Gomes LVasconcelos V(2023)Transforming Ideas into Code: Visual Sketching for ML DevelopmentCompanion Proceedings of the 2023 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Systems, Programming, Languages, and Applications: Software for Humanity10.1145/3618305.3623588(10-12)Online publication date: 22-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3618305.3623588
Pan LYu CHe ZShi Y(2023)A Human-Computer Collaborative Editing Tool for Conceptual DiagramsProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3580676(1-29)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3544548.3580676
Santana de Almeida EAhmed Ivan der Hoek A(2023)Let's Go to the Whiteboard (Again): Perceptions From Software Architects on Whiteboard Architecture MeetingsIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2023.331441049:10(4773-4795)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2023.3314410
Schäfer Bvan der Aa HLeopold HStuckenschmidt H(2023)Sketch2Process: End-to-End BPMN Sketch Recognition Based on Neural NetworksIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2022.322830849:4(2621-2641)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2022.3228308
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents