Examining truthfulness of informal diagrams more than a year after their creation

摘要

Programmers document their software not only by formal, “official” means (UML diagrams, user and/or system documentation, wiki pages etc.) but also ad-hoc by drawing sketches, say informal diagrams, on a paper or a whiteboard. The question arises if these informal diagrams created at some time during development of a software system are still relevant and trustworthy after a time has passed. We believe that these diagrams are drawn mainly to capture important design decisions, which we assume to be durable. There is a problem regarding evaluating the extent to which a diagram is true. We proposed an approach for measuring truthfulness of such informal diagrams, and then, we conducted a mini-experiment on sample diagrams (aged 13-21 months) to measure their truthfulness. All five sample diagrams have truthfulness above the 40 % level, four of them even above the 70 % level. We do this to justify a further research of deeper inclusion of informal diagrams into the software development process.