Automated versioning and temporal navigation for model sketches on large interactive displays

ABSTRACT

The development of complex software systems requires the collaboration and mutual understanding of stakeholders from various backgrounds, which is usually facilitated by joint design of complex graphical models. To support this collaboration, we introduce the concept of a so-called "Augmented Interaction Room" that is equipped with large interactive wall displays, each dedicated to a particular modeling perspective. These models evolve significantly over the project life-cycle as uncertainties are resolved and design decisions are made. Our focus in this paper is to help stakeholders obtain a clearer view of the models' evolution and past design rationales, without incurring significant cognitive effort for navigating a potentially very long and detailed model revision history. For this purpose, we describe mechanisms for storing the history of the continuously evolving models, and methods for temporal navigation that semi-automatically identify particularly relevant past model versions.

References

1. C. Andrews, A. Endert, and C. North, "Space to think: large high-resolution displays for sensemaking," in Proc. SIGCHI Conf. Human Factors in Computing Systems, ser. CHI '10. New York, NY, USA: ACM, 2010, pp. 55--64.
2. C. Anslow, S. Marshall, J. Noble, and R. Biddle, "Co-located collaborative software visualization," in Human Aspects of Software Engineering, ser. HAoSE '10. New York, NY, USA: ACM, 2010, pp. 4:1--4:2.
3. C. Anslow, S. Marshall, J. Noble, and R. Biddle, "Interactive multi-touch surfaces for software visualization," in Proc. Workshop on Data Exploration fo Interactive Surfaces DEXIS 2011, 2011, pp. 20--23.
4. C. Anslow, S. Marshall, J. Noble, E. Tempero, and R. Biddle, "User evaluation of polymetric views using a large visualization wall," in Proc. 5th intl. symp. Software visualization, ser. SOFTVIS '10. New York, NY, USA: ACM, 2010, pp. 25--34.
5. R. Ball and C. North, "The effects of peripheral vision and physical navigation on large scale visualization," in Proc. graphics interface 2008, ser. GI '08. Toronto, Ont., Canada, Canada: Canadian Information Processing Society, 2008, pp. 9--16.
6. R. Ball, C. North, and D. A. Bowman, "Move to improve: promoting physical navigation to increase user performance with large displays," in Proc. SIGCHI Conf. Human Factors in Computing Systems, ser. CHI '07. New York, NY, USA: ACM, 2007, pp. 191--200.
7. L. M. Berlin, R. Jeffries, V. L. O'Day, A. Paepcke, and C. Wharton, "Where did you put it? issues in the design and use of a group memory," in Proc. INTERACT '93 and CHI '93 Conf. Human Factors in Computing Systems, ser. CHI '93. New York, NY, USA: ACM, 1993, pp. 23--30.
8. D. Beyer and A. E. Hassan, "Animated Visualization of Software History using Evolution Storyboards," in Working Conference on Reverse Engineering, 2006, pp. 199--210.
9. X. Bi and R. Balakrishnan, "Comparing usage of a large high-resolution display to single or dual desktop displays for daily work," in Proc. SIGCHI Conf. Human Factors in Computing Systems, ser. CHI '09. New York, NY, USA: ACM, 2009, pp. 1005--1014.
10. M. Book, S. Grapenthin, and V. Gruhn, "Risk-aware migration of legacy data structures," in Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA), 2013 39th EUROMICRO Conference on, 2013, pp. 53--56.
11. M. Book, S. Grapenthin, and V. Gruhn, "Value-based migration of legacy data structures," in Software Quality Days (SWQD 2014), 2014, to appear.
12. M. Book, S. Grapenthin, and V. Gruhn, "Seeing the forest and the trees: focusing team interaction on value and effort drivers," in Proc. ACM SIGSOFT 20th Intl. Symp. Foundations of Software Engineering, ser. FSE '12. New York, NY, USA: ACM, 2012, pp. 30:1--30:4.
13. Q. Chen, J. Grundy, and J. Hosking, "An e-whiteboard application to support early design-stage sketching of uml diagrams," in Human Centric Computing Languages and Environments, 2003. Proceedings. 2003 IEEE Symposium on, 2003, pp. 219--226.
14. Q. Chen, J. Grundy, and J. Hosking, "Sumlow: early design-stage sketching of uml diagrams on an e-whiteboard," Software - Practice & Experience, vol. 38, no. 9, pp. 961--994, Jul. 2008.
15. M. Cherubini, G. Venolia, R. DeLine, and A. J. Ko, "Let's go to the whiteboard: how and why software developers use drawings," in Proc. SIGCHI Conf. Human Factors in Computing Systems, ser. CHI '07. New York, NY, USA: ACM, 2007, pp. 557--566.
16. L. M. Covi, J. S. Olson, E. Rocco, W. J. Miller, and P. Allie, "A room of your own: What do we learn about support of teamwork from assessing teams in dedicated project rooms," in Proc. Cooperative Buildings: Integrating Information, Organization and Architecture: First International Workshop, Co'Build '98. ACM Press, 1998.
17. D. Cubranic, G. Murphy, J. Singer, and K. Booth, "Hipikat: a project memory for software development," Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions on, vol. 31, no. 6, pp. 446--465, 2005.
18. C. H. Damm, K. M. Hansen, and M. Thomsen, "Tool support for cooperative object-oriented design: gesture based modelling on an electronic whiteboard," in Proc. SIGCHI conf. Human Factors in Computing Systems, ser. CHI '00. New York, NY, USA: ACM, 2000, pp. 518--525.
19. U. Dekel and J. D. Herbsleb, "Notation and representation in collaborative object-oriented design: an observational study," SIGPLAN Not., vol. 42, no. 10, pp. 261--280, Oct. 2007.
20. B. Dobing and J. Parsons, "How uml is used," Commun. ACM, vol. 49, no. 5, pp. 109--113, May 2006.
21. A. Evans, S. Kent, and B. Selic, UML 2000 - The unified modeling language: Advancing the standard. Springer, 2008.
22. E. S. Ferguson, Engineering and the Mind's Eye. MIT Press, 1994.
23. S. Grapenthin, M. Book, V. Gruhn, C. Schneider, and K. Völker, "Reducing complexity using an interaction room - an experience report," in ACM Special Interest Group on the Design of Communication Conference (SIGDOC 2013), 2013, to appear.
24. J. Grundy and J. Hosking, "Supporting generic sketching-based input of diagrams in a domain-specific visual language meta-tool," in Proc. 29th intl. conf. Software Engineering, ser. ICSE '07. Washington, DC, USA: IEEE Computer Society, 2007, pp. 282--291.
25. K. Gyllstrom, "Passages through time: chronicling users' information interaction history by recording when and what they read," in Proc. 14th intl. conf. Intelligent user interfaces, ser. IUI '09. New York, NY, USA: ACM, 2009, pp. 147--156.
26. T. Hammond and R. Davis, "Tahuti: a geometrical sketch recognition system for uml class diagrams," in ACM SIGGRAPH 2006 Courses, ser. SIGGRAPH '06. New York, NY, USA: ACM, 2006.
27. J. Hardy, C. Bull, G. Kotonya, and J. Whittle, "Digitally annexing desk space for software development (nier track)," in Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering, ser. ICSE '11. New York, NY, USA: ACM, 2011, pp. 812--815.
28. L. Kelly, Y. Chen, M. Fuller, and G. J. F. Jones, "A study of remembered context for information access from personal digital archives," in Proceedings of the second international symposium on Information interaction in context, ser. IIiX '08. New York, NY, USA: ACM, 2008, pp. 44--50.
29. M. Kleffmann, M. Book, and V. Gruhn, "Towards recovering and maintaining trace links for model sketches across interactive displays," in Traceability in Emerging Forms of Software Engineering (TEFSE), 2013 International Workshop on, 2013, pp. 23--29.
30. R. E. Kraut and L. A. Streeter, "Coordination in software development," Commun. ACM, vol. 38, no. 3, pp. 69--81, Mar. 1995.
31. J. H. Larkin and H. A. Simon, "Why a diagram is (sometimes) worth ten thousand words," Cognitive Science, vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 65--100, 1987.
32. S. Lundgren, "Toying with time: considering temporal themes in interactive artifacts," in Proceedings of the 2013 ACM annual conference on Human factors in computing systems, ser. CHI '13. New York, NY, USA: ACM, 2013, pp. 1639--1648.
33. N. Mangano, A. Baker, M. Dempsey, E. Navarro, and A. van der Hoek, "Software design sketching with calico," in Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM international conference on Automated software engineering, ser. ASE '10. New York, NY, USA: ACM, 2010, pp. 23--32.
34. N. Mangano, A. Baker, and A. van der Hoek, "Calico: a prototype sketching tool for modeling in early design," in Proceedings of the 2008 international workshop on Models in software engineering, ser. MiSE '08. New York, NY, USA: ACM, 2008, pp. 63--68.
35. N. Mangano and A. Hoek, "The design and evaluation of a tool to support software designers at the whiteboard," Automated Software Engineering, vol. 19, no. 4, pp. 381--421, 2012.
36. G. Mark, "Extreme collaboration," Commun. ACM, vol. 45, no. 6, pp. 89--93, Jun. 2002.
37. A. R. Martina Schütze, Pierre Sachse, "Support value of sketching in the design process," Research in Engineering Design, vol. 14, pp. 88--97, 2003.
38. Object Management Group, "Diagram definition (dd) specification," http://www.omg.org/spec/DD. {Online}. Available: http://www.omg.org/spec/DD
39. Object Management Group, "Xml metadata interchange (xmi) specification," http://www.omg.org/spec/XMI. {Online}. Available: http://www.omg.org/spec/XMI
40. M. Petre, "Uml in practice," in Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Software Engineering, ser. ICSE '13. Piscataway, NJ, USA: IEEE Press, 2013, pp. 722--731.
41. J. Rekimoto, "Time-machine computing: a time-centric approach for the information environment," in Proceedings of the 12th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, ser. UIST '99. New York, NY, USA: ACM, 1999, pp. 45--54.
42. Smart Technologies, "Smart board." {Online}. Available: http://smarttech.com/smartboard
43. D. S. Tan, R. Pausch, J. K. Stefanucci, and D. R. Proffitt, "Kinesthetic cues aid spatial memory," in CHI '02 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ser. CHI EA '02. New York, NY, USA: ACM, 2002, pp. 806--807.
44. S. Teasley, L. Covi, M. S. Krishnan, and J. S. Olson, "How does radical collocation help a team succeed?" in Proceedings of the 2000 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work, ser. CSCW '00. New York, NY, USA: ACM, 2000, pp. 339--346.
45. D. Čubranić, G. C. Murphy, J. Singer, and K. S. Booth, "Learning from project history: a case study for software development," in Proceedings of the 2004 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work, ser. CSCW '04. New York, NY, USA: ACM, 2004, pp. 82--91.
46. K. Wideroos and S. Pekkola, "Presenting the past: A framework for facilitating the externalization and articulation of user activities in desktop environment," 2013 46th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, vol. 7, p. 148a, 2006.

Index Terms

• Human-centered computing

  • Collaborative and social computing

• Software and its engineering

  • Software creation and management

    • Designing software

      • Software implementation planning

        • Software design techniques

    • Software development process management