The Software Design Process as a Series of Rotating Subject Pairs

In this paper, we focus on two videos of professional software designers working at the whiteboard on a provided design prompt. We present two related approaches: for the first, we perform a protocol analysis of the sessions, describing which subjects the designers discussed at each point in their design process. For the second, we closely track the ideas that the designers generated, how those ideas related to one another, and which high-level subjects they pertained to. Based on the data gathered, we provide insight into the subconscious strategies that drive the software design process. In particular, we observe that the software designers we studied tended to consider two highlevel subjects at a time, and that they regularly rotated through a mental list of known subjects in an effort to appropriately balance the tradeoffs between them.