CodeGraffiti: Using hand-drawn sketches connected to code bases in navigation tasks

Current IDEs excel at text manipulation, but offer little support for sketching and capturing informal visual artifacts that developers create during their work on the code base. Such artifacts promise to help the examination of existing source bases and the orientation therein when linked up to corresponding code fragments. In this paper, we present a design and prototype how to use linked sketches to assist the the developer in orientating in the code base. Our evaluation with 32 users shows that testers adopt the navigation through linked sketches and refer to the spatial documentation significantly more.