The Software Design Board: A Tool Supporting Workstyle Transitions in Collaborative Software Design

Software design is a team activity, and designing effective tools to support collaborative software design is a challenging task. Designers work together in a variety of different styles, and move frequently between these styles throughout the course of their work. As a result, software design tools need to support a variety of collaborative styles, and support fluid movement between these styles. This paper presents the Software Design Board, a prototype collaborative design tool supporting a variety of styles of collaboration, and facilitating transitions between them. The design of Software Design Board was motivated by empirical research demonstrating the importance of such support in collaborative software design, as well as activity analysis identifying the lack of support in existing tools for different styles of collaboration and transitions between them.