About the research

Like many professionals, software engineers rely heavily on sketches - i.e. informal, ad-hoc drawings - to reason about complex ideas. While sketching often occurs at whiteboards, digital sketching tools have recently become more prevalent.

Most such tools however focus solely on creating informal models. No current tools explicitly address the cognitively challenging engineering tasks that prompt software developers to sketch in the first place: understanding application requirements, optimizing an architecture, finding bugs, refactoring complex systems, etc. While current sketching tools help engineers to THINK about these tasks, they still require them to actually PERFORM those tasks manually afterwards.

This project therefore aims to elevate sketching to a novel interaction modality in software development tools that lets developers not just understand, but perform complex engineering tasks by expressing them intuitively through sketches that are drawn directly on the software artefacts in question - e.g. a test case sketched on top of a source code fragment, which leads to automatic generation and execution of an appropriate test driver.

Our work aspires to enable software engineers to express and implement their ideas more fluently and intuitively, thereby allowing them to focus their cognitive capacity on solving problems rather than handling tools, and improving the efficiency of the software development process and the quality of the resulting software products.
 

Project manager: Matthias Book

Address: University of Iceland, School of Engineering and Natural Sciences

Keywords: sketching, software development, interaction modality

Fund: Icelandic Research Fund

Type of fund: Project grant

Total:  51.390.000 ISK