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 present the results of an exploratory study in three companies and an online survey with 394 participants. Our participants included software developers, software architects, project managers, consultants, as well as researchers. They worked in different countries and on projects from a wide range of application areas. Most questions in the survey were related to the last sketch or diagram that the participants had created. Contrary to our expectations and previous work, the majority of sketches and diagrams contained at least some UML elements. However, most of them were informal. The most common purposes for creating sketches and diagrams were designing, explaining, and understanding, but analyzing requirements was also named often. More than half of the sketches and diagrams were created on analog media like paper or whiteboards and have been revised after creation. Most of them were used for more than a week and were archived. We found that the majority of participants related their sketches to methods, classes, or packages, but not to source code artifacts with a lower level of abstraction.
Artists sketch to clarify existing ideas and to develop new ones @cite_22 . In mechanical design, sketches not only document final designs, but also provide designers with a memory extension to help ideas taking shape and to communicate concepts to colleagues @cite_21 . Beside sketches being an external representation of memory and a means for communication @cite_6 @cite_11 , they serve as documentation @cite_13 . Sch " showed that the possibility to sketch has a positive effect on the quality of solutions in early stages of the design process @cite_13 . Furthermore, the ambiguity in sketches is a source of creativity @cite_49 @cite_17 @cite_25 and they support problem-solving and understanding @cite_1 . In our survey, we found that the latter was one of the main reasons why participants archived their sketch.
@cite_22 @cite_21 @cite_1 @cite_17 @cite_6 @cite_49 @cite_13 @cite_25 @cite_11
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Sketches are produced in many domains to communicate with self or others. They are a kind of external representation serving as a cognitive tool to augment memory and information processing by relieving the mind of some of those burdens. Sketches schematize. They do not portray reality; rather they convey conceptions of reality. Sketches use elements and spatial relations on paper to represent elements and spatial or abstract relations in the domain of interest. They incorporate relevant information and omit irrelevant. As such, they reveal people’s conceptions of domains.. An analysis of sketches of routes, for example, reveals that they segment routes around action points, typically turns. Order of drawing reflects mental organization of the domain. From sketches, novices extract structural information about the spatial relations among elements. Experts are also able to extract functional information, information that must be inferred from rather than directly extracted from sketches. Abstract This paper is a study on the importance of drawing (both formal drafting and informal sketching) during the process of mechanical design. Five hypotheses, focused on the types of drawings, their necessity in mechanical problem solving, and their relation to the external representation medium, are presented and supported. Support is through referenced studies in other domains and the results of protocol studies performed on five mechanical designers. Videotapes of all the marks-on-paper made by designers in representative sections of the design process were studied in detail for their type and purpose. The resulting data is supportive of the hypotheses. These results also give requirements for future computer aided design tools and graphics education, and goals for further studies. Introduction Drawing and sketching are activities all humans engage in, at some level or another, as of a very young age (if not deprived of the sense of sight). In developed societies, toddlers use drawing implements to make marks on paper. In less-developed societies, children and adults use sticks to draw on sand. Why do children draw? It seems that for a child, drawing is a form of play, with developmental benefits similar to those of both symbolic play and construction games (play typology instituted by Piaget and Inhelder). Most people acquire enough drawing skills during childhood to make graphic production an accessible strategy whenever pictorial representation is more effective than linguistic representation in communication and reasoning. For some communication and reasoning tasks, however, ordinary drawing skills are not sufficient, just as linguistic skills acquired during childhood are not necessarily adequate for sophisticated verbal and written expression tasks. A better command of language makes for better orators and reporters, and a better command of drawing skills makes for better illustrators and decorators. A special class of representational skill, linguistic or graphic, is the one needed for inventive purposes: this is the case of the poet, the visual artist, and the designer. The inventive process does not require wider skills: not necessarily a larger vocabulary or unlimited graphic techniques. Rather, what is required is an ability to use the representational act to reason with on the fly. Usually, this is a “front edge” process in which partial and rudimentary representations are produced, evaluated, transformed, modified, refined, and replaced by others if need be, until their maker is satisfied with the results. The unique thing about such processes is that, since they involve ill-structured problem-solving, it is not clear at the outset where the process is leading to, and what the end result might be. In this paper, it is our purpose to look at the way in which sketching assists in generating ideas and strengthening them by interpreting the “backtalk” of a sketch in progress, or one that has just been completed. We use a developmental axis to illustrate our claims. We start with children and show how they “read” new information off their sketches or drawings, and use it to define or refine the rationale for their representations. We then show how designers habitually practice a similar process in the early idea-generation phase of the design process. Hand-Drawn sketches are natural means by which abstract descriptions of environments can be provided. They represent weak prior information about the scene, thereby enabling a robot to perform autonomous navigation and exploration when a full metrical description of the environment is not available beforehand. In this paper, we present an extensive evaluation of our navigation system that uses a sketch interface to allow the operator of a robot to draw a rough map of an indoor environment as well as a desired trajectory for the robot to follow. We employ a theoretical framework for sketch interpretation, in which associations between the sketch and the real world are modeled as local deformations of a suitable metric manifold. We investigate the effectiveness of our system and present empirical results from a set of experiments in real-world scenarios, focusing both on the navigation capabilities and the usability of the interface.