Plans in programming: definition, demonstration, and development
Papers presented at the first workshop on empirical studies of programmers on Empirical studies of programmers
Cognitive dimensions of notations
Proceedings of the fifth conference of the British Computer Society, Human-Computer Interaction Specialist Group on People and computers V
The technology of team navigation
Intellectual teamwork
Inside a software design team: knowledge acquisition, sharing, and integration
Communications of the ACM
A guide to metaphorical design
Communications of the ACM
The sciences of the artificial (3rd ed.)
The sciences of the artificial (3rd ed.)
Collaborative conceptual design: a large software project case study
Computer Supported Cooperative Work - Special issue on studies of cooperative design
Software Visualization in the Large
Computer
Programming with agents: new metaphors for thinking about computation
Programming with agents: new metaphors for thinking about computation
Object-oriented analysis and design in software project teams
Human-Computer Interaction
Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Software engineering
Supporting distributed software design meetings: what can we learn from co-located meetings?
HSSE '05 Proceedings of the 2005 workshop on Human and social factors of software engineering
Let's go to the whiteboard: how and why software developers use drawings
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
"My Roomba is Rambo": intimate home appliances
UbiComp '07 Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Ubiquitous computing
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Finding a useful abstract representation is fundamental to solving many difficult problems in software engineering. In order to better understand how representations are actually used in key collaborative software engineering tasks, this empirical study examined all of the spoken representations of software behavior in 9 domain analysis sessions. It found that about 70% of them were metaphorical, representing system behavior as physical movement of objects, as perceptual processes, or in anthropomorphic terms ascribing beliefs and desires to the system. The pattern of use of these representations indicates 1) that they were not merely temporary placeholders, but rather their use persisted even when a specialized and more formal vocabulary had been developed, and 2) the metaphoric descriptions appear to reflect actual use of metaphor, rather than just a choice of vocabulary. The use of metaphor is explained in terms of how well they serve human cognitive abilities and collaborative needs. The predominance of metaphorical representations in synchronous collaborative sessions raises important issues about the possible misleading effects of metaphorical thinking. It also raises questions about the compatibility of the spoken representations with other representations (e.g., diagrams, specification languages) that trigger, and capture the results of, the verbal collaborative work.