It's a Complete Haystack: Understanding Dependency Management Needs in Computer-Aided Design

TL;DR

This paper investigates the challenges hardware designers face in managing complex CAD dependencies, identifying key issues and proposing design goals to improve awareness and collaboration in hardware development.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of dependency management challenges in CAD, based on interviews and forum discussions, and offers design goals to enhance collaborative workflows.

Findings

Identified nine key dependency management challenges in CAD.

Highlighting issues in traceability, navigation, and consistency.

Proposed design goals to improve dependency awareness.

Abstract

In today's landscape, hardware development teams face increasing demands for better quality products, greater innovation, and shorter manufacturing lead times. Despite the need for more efficient and effective processes, hardware designers continue to struggle with a lack of awareness of design changes and other collaborators' actions, a persistent issue in decades of CSCW research. One significant and unaddressed challenge is understanding and managing dependencies between 3D CAD (computer-aided design) models, especially when products can contain thousands of interconnected components. In this two-phase formative study, we explore designers' pain points of CAD dependency management through a thematic analysis of 100 online forum discussions and semi-structured interviews with 10 designers. We identify nine key challenges related to the traceability, navigation, and consistency of CAD dependencies, that harm the effective coordination of hardware development teams. To address these challenges, we propose design goals and necessary features to enhance hardware designers' awareness and management of dependencies, ultimately with the goal of improving collaborative workflows.