The design of object-oriented systems starts with modeling, a process to identify core concepts and their relations. Mainstream modeling techniques can be either informal (white board, CRC cards, etc.) or formal (e.g., UML editors). The former support well the creative modeling process, but their output is difficult to store, process and maintain. The latter reduce these problems, at the expense of creativity and productivity because they are tedious and not trivial to use. We present Cel, a touch- and gesture-based iPad application to rapidly create, manipulate, and store language agnostic object-oriented software models, based on a minimal set of constructs. Demo video URL: http://youtu.be/icQVS6w0jTE.

Integrated development environments (IDEs) include many tools that provide the means to construct programs. Coincidentally, the very same IDEs are a primary vehicle for program comprehension. We claim that IDEs may be an impediment for program comprehension because they treat software elements as text, which may be counterproductive in the context of program understanding-where abstracting from the source text to the level of structural entities and relationships is the key. We are currently building Gaucho, a visual object-focused environment that allows developers to write programs by creating and manipulating lightweight and intuitive depictions of object-oriented constructs. The research question we investigate here is how such an environment compares with traditional IDEs when it comes to performing program comprehension tasks. To answer our question, we conducted a preliminary controlled experiment with eight subjects, comparing Gaucho against a traditional IDE. We found that Gaucho outperforms the IDE regarding the correctness of the tasks, while it is slower with respect to the completion time. Our preliminary results suggest that alternative-visual-IDEs may be superior to traditional IDEs as program comprehension aids.