Collaborative Creativity: From Hand Drawn Sketches to Formal Domain Specific Models and Back Again

Most of the time developers make massive use of software tools in a software development process to support them in their day-to-day work. One of the first and most important phases is the design phase but within this phase tools are missing which support the creative but also collaborative workflow (parallel/distributed). At the moment engineers in team meetings use classic whiteboards to express their ideas. Subsequently a coworker uses a mobile phone or a camera to take photos of the work and remodel the picture with a modeling tool. That process is very inconvenient, error-prone and hinders a creative modeling cycle.  For overcoming this ineffective process this paper shows a new approach to use digital whiteboards to transform free hand sketches in formal models and back again during modeling in a distributed team. The approach is completely independent from a pre-defined modeling language. It provides an interactive training mode to learn new graphical syntax elements and to map these elements to formal meta-model entities. Based on the approach a collaborative sketch and modeling infrastructure was implemented.

September

In Proceedings of the Workshop of Models and their Role in Collaboration (MoRoCo) at the European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (ECSCW)

Paphos, Cyprus