A model of the communicative behavior of designers involved in cooperative software design

In this paper we present the use of Statecharts for modeling the communicative behavior of a team involved in cooperative software design. Design episodes were previously represented using diagrams called Dynamics of Interaction Diagrams from which we have now drawn up a cooperative design activity model. The modeling activity itself led to the recognition of a number of underlying properties, most of which comprised temporal relations between speech objects (representations of verbal communication actions). We also present an analysis showing the advantages and disadvantages of Statecharts for modeling software designers’ communicative behavior. Finally, we propose the use of another concurrent automaton, Colored Petri Nets, for the same purpose.