Recent studies have shown that sketches and diagrams play an important role in the daily work of software developers. If these visual artifacts are archived, they are often detached from the source code they document, because there is no ad- equate tool support to assist developers in capturing, archiving, and retrieving sketches related to certain source code artifacts. This paper presents SketchLink, a tool that aims at increasing the value of sketches and diagrams created during software development by supporting developers in these tasks. Our prototype implementation provides a web application that employs the camera of smartphones and tablets to capture analog sketches, but can also be used on desktop computers to upload, for instance, computer-generated diagrams. We also implemented a plugin for a Java IDE that embeds the links in Javadoc comments and visualizes them in situ in the source code editor as graphical icons.
@cite_15: Informal visualization in the form of sketching and diagramming has long been an established practise of professionals working in the fields of design, architecture, and engineering. Less is known, however, about the sketching and diagramming practices of computer scientists and software developers. Through a series of interviews with computer science researchers who develop software, we probed the purpose, contexts, and media in which they created and re-created sketches and diagrams, and the ways in which these informal visualizations evolved over time. Through our analysis we created visualizations of the observed sketching and diagramming lifecycles, which can contribute to a better understanding of the roles of sketching and diagramming in software development.
@cite_17: UML has been described by some as “the lingua franca of software engineering”. Evidence from industry does not necessarily support such endorsements. How exactly is UML being used in industry - if it is? This paper presents a corpus of interviews with 50 professional software engineers in 50 companies and identifies 5 patterns of UML use.
In our opinion, existing tools do not adequately consider developers' needs. In a recent study, Petre observed that software developers will not adopt tools and ideologies at odds with their considered practice'' @cite_17 . note that a tool integrating sketches into the software development workflow must support a broad range of work styles @cite_15 , which most of the above mentioned tools do not achieve.