Scribbles: an exploratory study of sketch based support for early collaborative object oriented design.

Scribbles represents a light weight intuitive tool to support early collaborative software design. Collaboration is not well supported in many modern CASE (computer aided software engineering) environments making paper and white boards an attractive alternative. As a result of this, CASE tools tend to be more suited to documenting designs rather than assisting the generation of a design, meaning that early ideas may be lost. Scribbles uses shape recognition, to allow freehand manipulation of a hybrid Mind Map. This preserves the simplicity of paper or a whiteboard whilst adding the ability to capture early design ideas in a reusable way. This is a very lightweight modeling environment ideally suited to introducing students to Object Oriented Design.