Sketches and diagrams in practice

Abstract

Sketches and diagrams play an important role in the daily work of software developers. In our talk, we present results from a study on the use of sketches and diagrams in software engineering practice. We conducted an exploratory study in three companies and an online survey with 394 software practitioners. They worked in different countries and on projects from a wide range of application areas. Most questions were related to the last sketch or diagram that the participants had created. The majority of the sketches and diagrams contained at least some UML elements. However, most of them were informal. More than half of the sketches and diagrams were created on analog media like paper or whiteboards and have been revised after creation. Most of them were used for more than one week and were archived.