DesignMinders: Preserving and Sharing Informal Software Design Knowledge

Software design is a knowledge-intensive activity. Knowledge is both generated and used when making crucial design decisions, and it is important to capture and share the knowledge in order to take advantage of the valuable insights gained. A particularly challenging setting for knowledge reuse is during informal software design sessions when developers are gathered at the whiteboard working to solve a design problem. It is during this activity that many existing approaches fail to address the needs of the developer to remain “in the moment” while engaged in discussion and sketching. In this paper we introduce DesignMinders, a tool currently being developed to address these issues by augmenting an electronic whiteboard with the ability to capture, refine and explore design knowledge in the form of notecards. This paper describes the problem of knowledge reuse during informal software design, and our decisions and progress with respect to DesignMinders so far.