Scribbler: From Collaborative Sketching to Formal Domain Specific Models and Back Again

Most of the time developers make extensive use of software tools in a software development process to support them in their day-to-day work. One of the first and most important phases of this process is the design phase, but within this phase intuitive and easy to use tools, which support the creative but also collaborative workflow (parallel/distributed), are missing. At the moment, developers use whiteboards to express their ideas in team meetings. Subsequently a coworker takes a picture of the sketches and remodels them with a modeling tool. That procedure is very inconvenient, error-prone and hindering in a creative modeling cycle. For overcoming this ineffective process this paper shows a new software tool using digital whiteboards to transform free hand sketches in formal models and back again during modeling in a distributed team. The transformation is completely independent from a pre-defined modeling language. The tool provides also a training mode to learn new graphical syntax elements and map these to formal metamodel entities. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0i3M9djPrRM [Mirror: http://sse-world.de/index.php?cID=3611]