Towards recovering and maintaining trace links for model sketches across interactive displays

In complex software projects, it is often difficult for a team of stakeholders with heterogeneous backgrounds to maintain a common understanding of the system´s structure and the challenges in its implementation. In this paper, we therefore introduce the concept of an augmented “Interaction Room”, i.e. a physical room whose walls are outfitted with wall-sized touchscreens that visualize different aspects of a software system. The information displayed on the walls is related, so when a user changes the content on one wall, e.g. by editing or navigating a diagram, the contents on the other walls should change correspondingly. This raises the need for traceability techniques to recover trace links between the walls and to maintain them in real-time. In contrast to how one works with existing modeling tools, the pragmatic methodology of the Interaction Room encourages users to work with sketches that may often remain incomplete and inconsistent. This makes the identification and maintenance of trace links particularly difficult. We therefore describe how a combination of prospective and retrospective traceability techniques can be used to recover and maintain the trace links in such an interactive room.