The Design of a Study Concerning the Capture of Important Design Bits at the Whiteboard

It is anecdotally known that designers would like to capture for potential later reference certain information from their software design meetings that take place at the whiteboard, with decisions and the rationale behind them often quoted as most important. What gets talked about at the whiteboard, however, tends to be much richer than just decisions and rationale. To date, no study has examined what developers recognize in the moment as important information for potential future use. Our long-term research focuses on this problem and consists of two components: (1) understanding what information developers deem potentially important for future use while they are designing at a whiteboard, and (2) developing a novel tool to assist them in capturing and later accessing this information. This paper introduces the design of the study we plan to conduct toward the first component. We motivate the research, discuss what we learned in our preliminary work in a pilot study with three teams of students, and then detail the future study that we intend to conduct with professionals.