Bridging the gap: fluidly connecting paper notecards with digital representations for story/task-based planning

Programmers use both paper and digital artifacts to aid in the process of software planning. This paper presents a prototype of a system that uses digital pen technology to integrate paper notecards and digital task plan representations, allowing programmers to utilize the affordances provided by both techniques. Through an ethnography of programmers who practice planning using both physical and digital artifacts, we discovered common actions performed by the programmers included card creation, card augmentation, card combining, and scheduling of card for completion. We designed interaction techniques to facilitate these actions and conducted a usability study (n=10) to evaluate the techniques. Through the study, we discovered that the initial prototype provided both positive and negative experiences for the user, providing insightful design implications for the future.