Supporting collaboration of heterogeneous teams in an augmented team room

It is often difficult for a team of stakeholders with heterogeneous backgrounds to maintain a common understanding of a system’s structure and the challenges in its implementation. Thus, especially in complex software projects, risks and inconsistencies are easily overlooked. In this paper, we present the concept of an Augmented Interaction Room (AugIR), i.e. a physical team room whose walls are outfitted with wall-sized touchscreens that visualize different aspects of a software system in the form of various model sketches. These sketches can be annotated by the stakeholders in order to explicitly mark important elements or indicate aspects that are critical for project success. The AugIR strives to support the collaborative work of heterogeneous teams and especially targets the inclusion of non-technical stakeholders into the communication process. Therefore, the AugIR continuously monitors the stakeholders’ design and modeling activities and analyzes the relationships between annotated contents to automatically uncover inconsistencies, contradictions and hidden potential project risks.