FLEXISKETCH TEAM: Collaborative Sketching and Notation Creation on the Fly

When software engineers collaborate, they frequently use whiteboards or paper for sketching diagrams. This is fast and flexible, but the resulting diagrams cannot be interpreted by software modeling tools. We present FLEXISKETCH TEAM, a tool solution consisting of a significantly extended version of our previous, single-user FLEXISKETCH tool for Android devices and a new desktop tool. Our solution for collaborative, model-based sketching of free-form diagrams allows users to define and re-use diagramming notations on the fly. Several users can work simultaneously on the same model sketch with multiple tablets. The desktop tool provides a shared view of the drawing canvas which can be projected onto an electronic whiteboard. Preliminary results from an exploratory study show that our tool motivates meeting participants to actively take part in sketching as well as defining ad-hoc notations.