Towards Employing Informal Sketches and Diagrams in Software Development

Abstract

Programmers write notes and draw informal sketches and diagrams. We hypothesize about understandability and helpfulness of these sketches and their deeper inclusion into software development process. We are leveraging the fact that we have a collection of such sketches affiliated to a commercial software system. We have the opportunity to study sketches that were created naturally, not intentionally for research purposes. The oldest sketch was created a year and a half ago and the most recent one a half a year ago. Our initial experiment shows that these sketches are pretty understandable even after some time - even for another person