Establishing and Navigating Trace Links between Elements of Informal Diagram Sketches

Abstract

The Augmented Interaction Room is a team room whose walls are outfitted with wall-sized touch screens that are used to create informal diagram sketches. It strives to help stakeholders in fostering a common understanding of a project's most important risk and value drivers by visualizing aspects of a software system from different perspectives and allowing stakeholders to annotate elements that are especially important or critical for project success. In this paper, we discuss how a combination of trace ability techniques and fuzzy search methods can be used to efficiently support the stakeholders' collaboration and their early design and decision making activities by providing an easy and intuitive visualization and navigation approach and by automatically uncovering potential inconsistencies and contradictions in the created sketches. Since the pragmatic methodology of the Augmented Interaction Room encourages stakeholders to work with handwritten sketches rather than with formal modeling languages, the identification and maintenance of trace links is particularly challenging.