A Collaborative Multi-Touch UML Design Tool

Human Centric Computing …, 2003

2004

Existing software modeling tools are widely recognized to be hard to use and, hence, to adopt. We believe those usability problems are related to a legacy of formalism-centric tools that don’t promote the new challenges of modern software development. In this short paper, we briefly describe a new tool, under development, that tries to promote usability in modeling tools to support collaborative development of interactive software. It focuses on usable, real-world languages and a developer-centered design.

Revista Brasileira de Computação Aplicada, 2019

Background. Modeling architectural aspects of the system is an essential activity in software development. Inthis context, developers work in parallel, and collaborate to define application software models, such as classdiagrams. Problem. Although many software modeling tools have been proposed, there is a lack of distributed collaboration features. Solution. This study proposes C-SAMT, a web tool for collaborative modeling of UML class diagrams. Developers can benefit from using C-SAMT when performing modeling tasks, such as creating domain models in parallel, and collaboratively. Evaluation. We recruited 20 industry professionals to perform a qualitative evaluation of the tool through a questionnaire. Results. Majority of Industry professionals (85%, 17/20) reported that totally agree that the communication channel of the tool worked properly, they also (80%, 16/20) totally agreed the models generated collaboratively with C-SAMT had small numbers of conflicts, and they also (90%, ...

2008

There is a growing need for development tools ubiquity, due to the portability and availability problems concerning desktop applications. In this paper, we suggest an approach to avoid any further download or installation. The main goal is to offer a collaborative and extensible web environment which covers a series of domains highly demanded by different kinds of working groups, in which it is crucial to have tools which facilitate the exchange of information and the collaboration among their members. The result would be the development of one or several diagrams accesible from any geographical location, independently of the device employed. By means of this environment, it will be possible to do research on the usability of collaborative tools for design diagrams, mainly UML, as well as research on the psychology of software engineering, assessing the results coming from the employment of methodologies, techniques, paradigms, patterns, etc. Both at an individual and at a collaborative development group level.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2000

The UML suggests the employment of use cases for capturing the requirements and for specifying the interaction between the users and the system being modeled. Use cases are easily understood by users since they are essentially textual descriptions, but lack the precision and the conciseness accomplished by the other diagrammatic tools of UML. Besides, there is no systematic method that helps the designer to obtain such UML diagrams from a set of use cases. In this paper we present a diagrammatic tool to represent the users/system interaction called User Interaction Diagram (UID). UIDs have proven to be a valuable tool to gather requirements since they describe the exchange of information between the system and the user in a high level of abstraction, without considering specific user interface aspects and design details as in other UML diagrams. We show how UIDs can be incorporated into the requirements and analysis workflows of the Unified Process for software development.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2006

COLLECT-UML is a constraint-based ITS that teaches objectoriented design using Unified Modelling Language (UML). UML is easily the most popular object-oriented modelling technology in current practice. We started by developing a single-user ITS that supported students in learning UML class diagrams. The system was evaluated in a real classroom, and the results show that students' performance increased significantly. In this paper, we present our experiences in extending the system to provide support for collaboration. We present the architecture, interface and support for collaboration in the new, multi-user system. A full evaluation study has been planned, the goal of which is to evaluate the effect of using the system on students' learning and collaboration.

Automated Software Engineering, 2006

User interface (UI) prototyping and scenario engineering have become popular techniques. Yet, the transition from scenario to formal specifications and the generation of UI code is still ill-defined and essentially a manual task, and the two techniques lack integration in the overall requirements engineering process. In this paper, we suggest an approach for requirements engineering that generates a user interface prototype from scenarios and yields a formal specification of the application. Scenarios are acquired in the form of collaboration diagrams as defined by the Unified Modeling Language (UML), and are enriched with user interface (UI) information. These diagrams are automatically transformed into UML Statechart specifications of the UI objects involved. From the set of obtained specifications, a UI prototype is generated that is embedded in a UI builder environment for further refinement. Based on end user feedback, the collaboration diagrams and the UI prototype may be iteratively refined, and the result of the overall process is a specification consisting of the Statechart diagrams of all the objects involved, together with the generated and refined prototype of the UI. The algorithms underlying this process have been implemented and exercised on a number of examples.

The current software development tools show the same form of interaction as when they started back, in the mid 70's. However, since the appearance of visual languages and due to their own nature, they can be handled by tools which have different input methods to conventional ones. By incorporating new motion detection technology, it is intended that new forms of interaction are established. Interactions which respond to the free movement of hands, therefore the software´s developer will have a substantial improvement in the user experience.

«UML» 2000—The Unified Modeling …, 2000

2006 10th International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design, 2006

Sketch plays an important role in the brainstorming of ideas. During conceptual design stage, designers use generally 2D graphical tools such as pencil and paper to draw a lot of sketchy documents for conveying ideas and communicating with other designers. Furthermore, conceptual design for complicated system involves a group of geographically distributed participants. However, most of current graphical design tools do not support such kind of collaborative sketching. This paper introduces a novel sketch-based interactive environment (COSINE) for cooperative design. Three key problems are addressed in this research: (1) how to represent and store sketch document for sketch-based cooperative design; (2) how does the system infer the designers' intention and help them to finish the design process;(3) how to implement the communication between client and server. Solutions to these problems are proposed in this paper. A prototype system for cooperative UML class diagram design based on COSINE is also outlined.