FlexiSketch: A Mobile Sketching Tool for Software Modeling

Abstract

Although most software engineers have access to various modeling tools, they often use paper and pencil to sketch ideas and to support modeling activities. This is particularly true when they are working in the field, for example gathering requirements from stakeholders. Sketches documented on paper very often need to be re-modeled in order to allow further processing -an error-prone and timeconsuming task. The aim of our work is to better integrate these early sketching and modeling activities into the overall software engineering process. We have prototyped FlexiSketch, a mobile application that supports freeform, flexible, in-situ modeling and allows software engineers to annotate their models. Apart from the application and the underlying conceptual solution we also present the results of initial experiments. Those suggest that the tool supports freeform sketching similar to paper and pencil, and that practitioners would be willing to use a tool like FlexiSketch in their daily work. Abstract. Although most software engineers have access to various modeling tools, they often use paper and pencil to sketch ideas and to support modeling activities. This is particularly true when they are working in the field, for example gathering requirements from stakeholders. Sketches documented on paper very often need to be re-modeled in order to allow further processing -an error-prone and time-consuming task. The aim of our work is to better integrate these early sketching and modeling activities into the overall software engineering process. We have prototyped FlexiSketch, a mobile application that supports freeform, flexible, in-situ modeling and allows software engineers to annotate their models. Apart from the application and the underlying conceptual solution we also present the results of initial experiments. Those suggest that the tool supports freeform sketching similar to paper and pencil, and that practitioners would be willing to use a tool like FlexiSketch in their daily work.

Type Inference in Flexible Model-Driven Engineering

“…Flexisketch [6] is a mobile based drawing editor that allows users to draw models. The approach is based on the assumption that business analysts prefer to use pencil and paper for their modelling activities.…”

“…The drawn elements can have types annotated to them to allow model management suites run on the drawings. In this way the models written at the initial phases of the product development can be reused throughout the whole software engineering process [6].…”

“…As one can extract from the above, the main goal of Flexisketch is to unify freeform modelling with formal structured modelling [6]. The high level requirements for an approach that allows the authors to fulfil this goal are highlighted in [6] and summarised below:…”

“…The high level requirements for an approach that allows the authors to fulfil this goal are highlighted in [6] and summarised below:…”

Type inference in flexible model-driven engineering using classification algorithms

“…a metamodel, in flexible MDE approaches engineers and domain experts start the process by defining example models in free-form drawing tools [11,18,23,38]. Flexible modelling is arguably more accessible to domain experts as the latter can use tools that they are already familiar with to express the concepts of the domain; the involvement of domain experts is widely argued to be important in the definition of highquality DSLs [12,13,23,35].…”