How and Why We Draw Code
August 29th, 2007
Interesting paper by Mauro Cherubini et al. looking at when and why software developers draw pictures. My takeaway is that for most “thinking” purposes, today’s computer drawing tools impose overhead without adding value; it’s only for “archival” purposes that it’s worth cleaning up. I was very interested in their finding that this is true even for developers with tablets…
And of course, Jorge got there first… 
Our agile instructor told us to draw pictures on a whitebooard, then photograph them and post them on a website. Good enough for most archival purposes, and extremely low overhead, assuming that disk space is cheap…