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Tam, J., Greenberg, S. and Maurer, F. (2000)
Change Management. In Proceedings of the Western Computer Graphics Symposium 2000. (Panorama Mountain Village, BC, Canada), March 26-29.
Type: Refereed conference (full paper).
Also collected in: Report 2000-652-04, March.
Additional materials: powerpoint presentation.

Download as: Pdf

Abstract.
In this paper, we analyze the problems of keeping up with diagrammatic changes being made within a collaborative software design tool. With these graphical tools, one software engineer may specify possible software architectures e.g., through a UML editor. A second software engineer may then modify the diagram. The problem is how the original engineer can track what changes had been made. Most systems provide little or no support for this, and we believe that relying on the engineer’s memory is inadequate. We propose a several graphical representations that can illustrate to an author what has changed. Issues in graphical representation of changes include how actual changes can be portrayed, as well as ways to filter the view to ensure the designers only see relevant changes at an appropriate level of detail.

Keywords: Change Management, information filtering, graphical representations, graphical software design tools.