Use of Informal Sketches, Diagrams and Models in Software Development

Informal sketching, diagrams and models are widely used during software development processes. They are important for software engineers to share ideas or designs and explain them to others. In order to preserve the knowledge embedded within these short lived artifacts, they can be converted to formal diagrams. Many tools try to ease this process for developers. This can be achieved on many levels. These tools range from simple drag and drop sketching to sketch recognition and integration with meta models or consistency checks. Therefore different shape and sketch recognition techniques are examined. However, none of these tools have proven to be successful enough to replace free hand sketching without processing.