Abstract
Software design is an important creative step in the engineering of software systems, yet we know surprisingly little about how humans actually do it. While it has been argued before that there is a need for formal frameworks to help capture design dialogues in a format amenable to analysis, there is almost no work that actually attempts to do so. In this paper, we take a first step in this direction by exploring the application of concepts from agent dialogues to the description of actual design dialogues between human software designers. We have found that this can be done in principle and present a set of dialogue moves that we have found useful in the coding of an example dialogue. Through this formulation of the dialogue, we were able to identify some interesting patterns of moves and dialogue structures. More importantly, we believe that such a representation of design dialogues provides a good basis for a better understanding of how designers interact.
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Black, E., McBurney, P., Zschaler, S. (2014). Towards Agent Dialogue as a Tool for Capturing Software Design Discussions. In: Black, E., Modgil, S., Oren, N. (eds) Theory and Applications of Formal Argumentation. TAFA 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8306. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-54373-9_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-54373-9_7
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