IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON JOURNAL NAME, MANUSCRIPT ID 1 Calico: An Interactive Tool for Informal Software Design

Abstract — Whiteboards serve an important role in supporting informal software design, providing a fluid and flexible medium for collaboration. Interactive whiteboards offer the potential for enhanced support for manipulating content, managing sketches, and working across distance, but little is known about how this support affects the practice of informal software design. To understand the opportunities and challenges, we first conducted a literature review, identifying 14 behaviors that occur during informal software design. We then designed an interactive whiteboard system – Calico – to support the full spectrum of these behaviors and conducted a field deployment of Calico to three groups of software designers. Through usage logs and interviews, we examined the effects of interactivity on whiteboard use across 14 design behaviors, identifying ways in which interactive whiteboards support the practices used in physical whiteboards and where they enable designers to work more effectively. Index Terms—design concepts, human factors in software design, interaction styles, computer-supported cooperative work ————————— — u ——————————