SUMMARY PAPER ON

SPECIAL ISSUES IN
SOFTWARE
ENGINEERING
HOW SOFTWARE DESIGNERS
INTERACT WITH SKETCHES
AT THE WHITEBOARD

PRESENTER : WAN SYAHIRA AMRA BINTI WAN HISHAMUDDIN

MAIN GOALS
To examine the role of sketching within
the design process in details
To examine the type of sketches design
process in details
To examine the type of sketches designers
create, how designers focus on sketches
and transfer their focus between sketches
To examine how the sketches supports
reasoning within activities

QUESTIONS TO BE ANSWERED
- Type of sketches. What types of sketches do designers
create? Do the sketches created vary in relation to the
approach to design taken? How syntactically complex are
sketches? How do sketches evolve?
- Focus. How long do designers focus on individual
sketches? How do designers make reference to sketches?
How do designers shift their attention between sketches?
- Reasoning. How long do designers focus on individual
sketches? How do designers make reference to sketches?
How do designers shift their attention between sketches
support? Are the outcomes of design discussions always
recorded in the sketches supporting these discussions?

How the research been done?

Capture
moment-to
moment
data

Study : to examine how

sketches evolve and support
reasoning activities on a
moment-to-moment basis

How designer introduce type

of
visual synthetic elements
How designers shifted their
focus
between sketches
How designers used sketches
to
support reasoning activities

Who ?
8 pairs of
professional
software
designers

How?
14 hours of
videos for
4238 events
across 155
sketches

METHODS
Participants
Expert designers
Grouped into pairs
Same organization
15 Males, 1 Female

Task
To design an educational traffic flow simulation program to be used by a
professor in a civil engineering course to teach students traffic light pattern
Requirements

Create visual maps of roads

Specify the behavior of lights at intersections
Simulate traffic flow
Change parameter of simulation

Setting
Conducted at participants place of work
Whiteboard size : ~ 8ft wide and 4ft tall
Participant are not allowed to write on the prompt or other paper
Session lasted approximately 2 and a half hours

CODING SCHEMES
Focusing on 3 aspects :
What types of sketches and visual syntactic
elements do software designers use during
design at the whiteboard?

How do software designers focus on and

transition among the sketches they
produce?

What reasoning activities do software

designers use their sketches to support?

CODING SCHEME 1 : Types of sketches

and VSE the software designers use
during design at the whiteboard

Sketch Type
Based on 2 factors :
the set of graphical symbols and compositional rules characterizing
the sketch, and
designers verbal references to the sketch.

Sketch Domain
The 4 domains :
requirements repeating or extending the requirements provided in
the prompt,
the architecture or implementation of the software system,
the user interface of the system as the user sees and interacts with
it, and
the problem domain modelling the problem described in the
prompt.

Visual Synthetic Element (VSE) Types

Includes :

CODING SCHEME 2 : Examines software

designers focus and transitions between
sketches
3 behaviors signaling designers reference to
adjacent sketches :
quick glance,
point with a finger, or
split focus (pointing and glancing at different sketches).

3 additional dimensions of relationship between

the source and destination sketches
Abstraction
Alternatives
Point-in-time

CODING SCHEME 3 : Examines the

reasoning activities supported by
sketches
Reasoning activities code focus on activities
that :
involved lower-level goals over short periods of time,
had well-defined boundaries, and
could be consistently distinguished by both coders.

3 reasoning activities :
Mental simulation
Review of progress
Suggested design alternatives

MAIN FINDINGS
( ANSWERED )
Type of sketches
Designer may approach a design problem from the
perspectives of user interface, the system, or requirements,
leads to different types of sketches.
Design very rarely reordered and rearranged lists
Sketches increase in synthetic complexity as design
conversation progress and designers introduce new synthetic
elements to records aspects of the design
Focus and transitions
Designers often transfer their focus repeatedly among a small
group of sketches
Designers move rapidly between sketches
Designers often referred to adjacent sketches in short bursts
Reasoning activities
Sketches provide information and somethings to gestures at
Sketches support mental simulations, helping designers to
propose new ideas, clarify and refine and reveal implications
Designers decided on solutions without writing them down and

MY PERSONAL POINTS OF
VIEW
1. Sketches are important in design process.
2. The sketches of the design may varied depending on the
approaches taken while sketching. The approaches
includes domain, requirements, and system.
3. Designers rapidly shifted their focus over small groups of
sketches, with each sketch playing an important and
distinct role within the design conversation.
4. Sketches served an important role in helping designers
discuss alternatives, review their progress, and perform
mental simulations. It supports design conversation.