Towards Exploratory Software Design Environments for the Multi-Disciplinary Team

Abstract

The creation of a new software system can be a wicked problem. Consequently, it is important for such projects to have a collaborating team of experts from multiple disciplines. While agile development processes foster such a collaboration on the social level, the tools used by individual experts still prevent team members from seeing the overall result of their collective modifications on the resulting system. Roles in the process, such as content designers and user experience designers, only get feedback on the impact of their changes on their artifacts. Based on the concept of exploratory programming environments, we propose a new perspective on the environments used in software development, called exploratory software design environments. We describe the properties of such an environment and illustrate the perspective with existing related tools and environments.