Lukas Spychalski
Diploma Thesis Student
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Diploma Thesis
| Title | Communication Of Source Code Designs Through Sketching |
| Supervisor | Prof. Dr. Jan Borchers | Prof. Dr. Björn Hartmann |
| Advisor | Dipl.-Inform. Leonhard Lichtschlag |
| Abstract | Understanding the design of source code and the mental model behind it is still a major problem for programmers. Many software visualization tools are designed to support programmers, but these tools are dependent on the underlying source code, and programmers need to know more than the source code can convey in order to understand it. Sketching is an established tool for ideation, exploration and communication and software developers use sketches frequently in different phases of the software development process to depict and convey different views and concepts of the system under development. To aid the communication of source code designs, I introduce the functionality to integrate hand-drawn sketches into a software development environment and connect them to source code. After an initial study of software architects and developers regarding the use of sketches in their everyday work, the fundamentals of a connection between source code and sketches are presented. Based on these fundamentals, a software prototype is developed that connects sketches and source code. For the purpose of evaluating the software prototype and its functionality, 32 participants were observed and interviewed in a user study. The results and implications of the user study as well as suggestions for future work are presented. |
| Files | Thesis | Talk | Video |
Publications
- Leonhard Lichtschlag, Lukas Spychalski and Jan Borchers. CodeGraffiti: Using Hand-drawn Sketches Connected to Code Bases in Navigation Tasks. In VL/HCC 2014: Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, pages 65–68,July 2014.
- Lukas Spychalski. Communication Of Source Code Designs Through Sketching. Diplomarbeit, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, May 2013.