Collaborative Creativity: From Hand Drawn Sketches 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 is the design phase. Here tools are missing which support the creative and collaborative workflow (parallel/distributed). At the moment software designers uses classic whiteboards in team meetings to express their ideas. Subsequently a coworker uses a mobile phone or a camera to take photos of the work and remodel the picture with a modeling tool. That process is very inconvenient, error-prone and hinders a creative modeling cycle. For overcoming this ineffective process this paper shows a new approach to use digital whiteboards to transform free hand sketches in formal models and back again while modeling in a distributed team. The approach is completely independent from a pre-defined modeling language. It provides an interactive training mode to learn new graphical syntax elements and map these elements to formal metamodel entities. Based on the approach a collaborative sketch and modeling infrastructure was implemented. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0i3M9djPrRM [Mirror: http://sse-world.de/index.php?cID=3611] Motivation and State-of-the-Art Nowadays, software development is a creative and distributed team process. The early and creative design phase is very important for successful software projects. In: Nolte, A., Prilla, M., Rittgen, P. and Oppl, S.: Proceedings of the International Workshop on Models and their Role in Collaboration at the ECSCW 2013 (MoRoCo 2013)