Computer users have rapidly increased in both number and diversity (Scaffidi et al 2005). They include managers, accountants, engineers, home makers, teachers, scientists, health care workers, insurance adjusters, salesmen, and administrative assistants. Many of these people work on tasks that rapidly vary on a yearly, monthly, or even daily basis. Consequently, their software needs are diverse, complex, and frequently changing. Professional software developers cannot directly meet all of these needs because of their limited domain knowledge and because their development processes are too slow.
End-user development (EUD) helps to solve this problem. EUD is "a set of methods, techniques and tools that allow users of software systems, who are acting as non-professional software developers, at some point to create, modify, or extend a software artifact" (Lieberman et al 2006). In particular, EUD enables end users to design or customize the user interface and functionality of software. This is valuable because end users know their own context and needs better than anybody else, and they often have real-time awareness of shifts in their respective domains. Through EUD, end users can tune software to fit their requirements more closely than would be possible without EUD. Moreover, because end users outnumber professional software developers by a factor of 30-to-1 (Figure 1), EUD "scales out" software development activities by enabling a much larger pool of people to participate.
However, EUD is inherently different from traditional software development, and trying to support EUD by simply mimicking traditional approaches is often insufficient to produce successful results. End users usually do not have training in professionals' programming languages, formal development processes, or modeling and diagramming notations. Moreover, end users often lack the time or motivation to learn these traditional techniques, since end users usually write code in order to achieve a short- or medium-term goal rather than to create a durable software asset that will produce a continuing revenue stream. Consequently, supporting EUD requires providing appropriate tools, social structures, and development processes that are highly usable, quickly learned, and easily integrated into domain practice.
EUD overlaps with two similar concepts, end-user programming and end-user software engineering. End-user programming (EUP) enables end users to create their own programs (Ko et al 2011). This subset of EUD is the most mature from a research and practice perspective, so we focus a later section of this article on that portion of EUD. The difference between EUP and EUD is that EUD methods, techniques, and tools span the entire software development lifecycle, including modifying and extending software, not just the "create" phase.
The other related concept overlapping with EUD is end-user software engineering (EUSE). EUSE is a relatively new subset of EUD that began about a decade ago. Its emphasis is on the quality of the software end users create, modify, or extend; thus its research focuses on methods, techniques, and tools that promote the quality of such software. This area has arisen because of the ample evidence that the programs end users create are filled with expensive errors (Panko 1998; Burnett 2010; Ko et al 2011). We therefore focus on the EUSE subset of EUD in a later section of this article.
Author/Copyright holder: Courtesy of Christopher Scaffidi. Copyright terms and licence: Unknown (pending investigation). See section "Exceptions" in the copyright terms below.
Figure 10.1: Projected population sizes for American workplaces in 2012, based on federal data (note that categories are not mutually exclusive)
Author/Copyright holder: Courtesy of Rikke Friis Dam and Mads Soegaard. Copyright terms and licence: CC-Att-ND (Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported)
Author/Copyright holder: Courtesy of Rikke Friis Dam and Mads Soegaard. Copyright terms and licence: CC-Att-ND (Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported)
End-User-Development - Business Value - Applicability in Industry
Author/Copyright holder: Courtesy of Rikke Friis Dam and Mads Soegaard. Copyright terms and licence: CC-Att-ND (Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported)
End-User-Development - Future Directions
10.1 The birth of EUD
Prior to the 1980's, most computing occurred on mainframes controlled by professional developers in information systems departments. End users had little influence over the form and function of software running on a mainframe, which they generally viewed through simple terminal windows and controlled with simple textual commands (Figure 2). Information systems departments rarely had enough staff time to design and implement all of the software enhancements requested by users (Brancheau and Wetherbe 1987).
EUD grew out of a confluence of innovations embodied in the machines known as "microcomputers" (a term eventually replaced with "personal computer"). First, these machines were inexpensive enough that organizations could afford to provide each user with a machine. Having their own machines made it viable for users to modify ("tailor") the machine's software settings without impacting the computing environment of other users. Second, microcomputers had sufficient hardware power so that users could compile (or interpret) new code in languages such as Basic. This in turn provided infrastructure for end users to create new applications. Third, microcomputers soon came to include innovative new features such as the mouse and powerful graphics cards, which accelerated usability advances such as graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and direct manipulation; these advances, in turn, opened up the possibility of novel programming tools specifically designed to meet the needs of users.
Spreadsheets were the first major EUD programming environment made possible by these innovations (Bricklin et al 1979), beginning with VisiCalc (Figure 3), then continuing with Lotus 1-2-3 and Excel. Although users of spreadsheet systems may not think of themselves as "doing programming," spreadsheet systems are programming environments because their formulas are first-order functional programs (Jones et al 2003). In such programs, the formulas can refer to input "variables" (cell names) and the results of the formulas are computed output values. The availability of spreadsheet software was a major factor in spurring early demand for microcomputers (Ichbiah 1993). Newer technologies such as the web and mobile computing have since opened up increasingly diverse and powerful opportunities for end users to create and tailor software.
Author/Copyright holder: Courtesy of e53 Copyright terms and licence: CC-Att-SA-2 (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Unported).
Figure 10.2: Terminal interface presenting a fixed menu, where users type a number to indicate a menu selection
Author/Copyright holder: Courtesy of Dave Winer. Copyright terms and licence: CC-Att-SA-2 (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Unported).
Figure 10.3: Visicalc circa 1980
10.2 Tailoring
Tailoring is any "activity to modify a computer application within its context of use" (Won et al 2006). Tailoring can be a simple or complex activity. At each increased level of complexity, users have more ability to redesign the interaction and functionality of an application. At the most basic level, tailoring encompasses specifying parameters to an existing application in a way that changes its behavior at a high level of granularity. For example, a person might use a graphical user interface to indicate which features of a spreadsheet editor should be visible (Figure 4) or how a word processor should respond to various inputs (Figure 5). Once tailoring begins to involve creating full-fledged programs in order to extend the functionality of an application, the activity seamlessly encompasses end-user programming (below). For instance, a user might create scripts called "macros" that manipulate the buttons, text, or other graphical user interface elements within an application. Such macros can extend applications with new functionality or make existing functionality more usable (Figure 6). Researchers have proposed a variety of component-based frameworks that can be used to implement easily-tailored applications (Won et al 2006). For instance, the "Selection" object referenced in Figure 6 is actually a component representing the region of text that is currently highlighted by the user in the word processor. The component-based framework makes it possible for an interpreter to manipulate the highlighted text in response to macros' instructions.
Author/Copyright holder: Courtesy of Christopher Scaffidi. Copyright terms and licence: Unknown (pending investigation). See section "Exceptions" in the copyright terms below.
Figure 10.4: Screen in Microsoft Excel for tailoring which features should be activate and visible
Author/Copyright holder: Courtesy of Christopher Scaffidi. Copyright terms and licence: Unknown (pending investigation). See section "Exceptions" in the copyright terms below.
Figure 10.5: Screen in Microsoft Word for tailoring how the application handles clicks on hyperlinks, copy/paste commands, and other kinds of user input
Author/Copyright holder: Courtesy of Christopher Scaffidi. Copyright terms and licence: Unknown (pending investigation). See section "Exceptions" in the copyright terms below.
Figure 10.6: Using a code editor to create three Microsoft Word text-manipulation macros that are linked (through a separate screen) to keyboard shortcuts; for example, the first macro has a single instruction indicating that the application should convert whatever is on the system clipboard into a textual representation and then paste it into the document.
10.3 End-user programming (EUP)
End-user programming (EUP) is defined as "programming to achieve the result of a program, rather than the program itself" (Ko et al 2011). In EUP, the developer's goal is to actually use the program; this contrasts with professional programming, where the goal is to create a program for other people to use, often in exchange for monetary compensation. The programs created through EUP can be extensions of existing applications (as in Figure 6, above), or they can be new applications that run separately from existing applications. End users can perform EUP through a wide range of interaction styles (Nardi 1993), as we discuss next.
10.3.1 Programming using visual attributes
In environments supporting the visual programming style of interaction, at least some of a program's semantics is expressed through the visual layout of the program. For example, the grid-like arrangement of cells in a spreadsheet carries a certain semantics; specifically, cells that are vertically or horizontally aligned with one another are part of a composite object defined solely based on the visual layout of cells (e.g, the range B:B references all of the second column in Microsoft Excel). In a visual language, semantics can hypothetically be encoded in many attributes of a visual representation, such as position, color, size, and intersection with other shapes. As another example, Figure 7 shows a visual language where each instruction is a colored block whose color indicates what kind of instruction it is and whose shape indicates what other blocks can appear next or before this block. Figure 8 shows a third example of a visual language. As with many visual languages, the LabView programming tool allows users to drag and drop these shapes using the GUI. Another common way of interacting through a visual language is with a form (Figure 9). In such an interface, the user cannot freely drag and drop shapes but rather must make selections from pre-defined fields.
Author/Copyright holder: Unknown (pending investigation). Copyright terms and licence: Unknown (pending investigation). See section "Exceptions" in the copyright terms below.
Figure 10.7: Visual interface for editing the three scripts for the ball in a 'pong' game animation. The programmer lays out sprites on the right; clicking a sprite brings up its scripts for editing in the center. Primitives can be dragged-and-dropped from the toolbox at left. (Resnick et al 2009)
Author/Copyright holder: Courtesy of Sam Shearman. Copyright terms and licence: CC-Att-SA-2 (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Unported).
Figure 10.8: LabVIEW programming language for creating circuit simulations and other programs. Each box represents a computational component, while lines indicate flow of data (similar to wires carrying signals)
Author/Copyright holder: Courtesy of Christopher Scaffidi. Copyright terms and licence: Unknown (pending investigation). See section "Exceptions" in the copyright terms below.
Figure 10.9: User interface in Microsoft Word for creating a style, which is a set of formatting instructions that will be applied to multiple labeled regions in the document
10.3.2 Programming-by-demonstration (PBD)
Programming-by-demonstration (PBD), sometimes called programming-by-example, is a programming technique whereby the user demonstrates the new program's logic, from which the programming environment infers a program representing that logic. Some PBD systems are able to deductively infer the entire program, while others deduce what they can and ask the user for help for the rest (Cypher 1993). PBD-based tools are available for creating animations (Repenning and Perrone 2000; McDaniel and Myers 1999) and many other kinds of programs (Cypher 1993). One problem with PBD has been representing the final program in a form useful to the user (Cypher 1993; Yang et al 1997), to enable the end-user developer to review, test, and debug the program. Thus, PBD is often used in combination with visual or textual languages.
For example, a user could create a Microsoft Word macro (like those shown in Figure 6) through PBD. The user would first click a button or menu item indicating that the application should start watching the user's actions. The user would then use the GUI to demonstrate the desired behavior for the macro; for example, the user might use a series of menu items and dialog windows to paste the system clipboard as text. The user would click the "stop recording" button so that Microsoft Word stops watching the user's actions. At that point, the application would generate a macro containing VBScript instructions for repeating the demonstrated actions. The user could give the macro a keyboard shortcut and a name, if desired, in order to simplify running or editing it later. In addition, the user might want to edit the macro's instructions so that they perform a task slightly different than the one that was demonstrated, particularly if the user wants the macro to complete a task that is impossible with the existing GUI (rather than merely hard-to-use). In this way, the user could add completely new functionality to an application, with PBD serving to provide a starting point for another approach to programming.
10.3.3 Programming-by-specification
Programming-by-specification is an interaction style where the user describes a desired program, and a tool then generates the program for the user. As in PBD, the generated program can then be represented to facilitate review and customization by the user. For example, Liu and Lieberman (2005) implemented a system that accepts a specification in natural language and generates a corresponding program written in Python. A key limitation of this approach, as with inference-based PBD approaches, is that it is difficult for a user to predict what program will be generated from any particular input. Another is that, as with PBD, representation can be a difficult issue. For example, if the input interaction is done with English but the output is a traditional programming language such as Python, the end user must be fluent in both languages. Another limitation is that the programming tool can often correctly process only a limited range of inputs. This restricts the usefulness of the tool and also makes it difficult for a user to predict whether (and how) some particular input will be "understood" by the tool (e.g, could the Liu and Lieberman tool mentioned above generate games, and if so, what kinds of games?) In order to make the bounds of a tool's input language more obvious to users, some systems provide a forms-based visual interface (Figure 10) rather than a textual interface, thereby restricting users' specifications to only those that can actually be handled by the tool (Scaffidi et al 2009).
Author/Copyright holder: Courtesy of Christopher Scaffidi. Copyright terms and licence: Unknown (pending investigation). See section "Exceptions" in the copyright terms below.
Figure 10.10: Visual specification of what a phone number looks like; from this specification, the tool generates code that can check whether a particular string matches the specification (Scaffidi 2009)
10.3.4 Programming with text
Programming with text is the most traditional interaction technique for programming, and for a time, some believed that this style of programming would not be appropriate for EUP. However, as the previous examples have shown, most programming environments that support other interaction styles also include text to some extent. As another example, Figure 11 shows the textual language that the CoScripter tool uses to represent a web macro, which is a script that directs a web browser to navigate the web and manipulate web sites in a particular way (Leshed et al 2008); such a web macro is typically created through PBD and then customized in textual form as needed. Despite the proliferation of alternative interaction styles, text remains widely used because of its conciseness and effectiveness for communicating abstract concepts.
Author/Copyright holder: Scaffidi, Bogart, Burnett, Cypher, Myers and Shaw 2010. Copyright terms and licence: All Rights Reserved. Reproduced with permission. See section "Exceptions" in the copyright terms below.
Figure 10.11: Using the CoScripter programming tool to edit a web macro that tells the browser to look up information on the American Airlines website. The macro's execution has been paused at the second instruction (left), which instructs CoScripter to highlight Flight Number on the web page (right) and fill it in from the user's 'Personal Database' configuration file (lower left). Scaffidi et al 2010.
10.4 End-user software engineering (EUSE)
End-user software engineering (EUSE) is defined as "end-user programming involving systematic and disciplined activities that address software quality issues" (Ko et al 2011). Attention to quality is important for EUP because poorly-written software can cause data loss, security breaches, financial loss, or even physical harm, even when the software is created by end-user developers. The software qualities relevant to EUSE are the same as those of interest to professional developers who sell their products. These qualities include reliability, performance, maintainability, reusability, privacy, and security. Some qualities, such as maintainability and reusability, only become apparent after a program has been written and in operation for some time. Thus, EUSE combines the goal of EUP, which focuses on enabling end users to create software, with the concern for quality of that software across its entire lifecycle. This lifecycle includes requirements, design, verification, debugging and code reuse (in addition to actual implementation, which has already been described above in the context of EUP tools).
10.4.1 Requirements and design
Requirements describe what a program should do, and design refers to determining how a program should do it. For example, a requirement might be that a program should be able to sort a list of mailing addresses, and its design might detail the sorting algorithm to be used.
Examples of requirements (goals) in EUD include personalizing the way that an application or computer behaves, automating time-consuming tasks, performing computations that are hard to do accurately by hand, or communicating information (Ko et al 2011; Blackwell 2004; Blackwell 2006; Rosson et al 2002). Getting these requirements right is a critical aspect from the perspective of EUSE, because of its emphasis on quality. Professional developers are expected to investigate, document, and refine requirements before they start to design or code an application. For example, they might try to identify inconsistencies in requirements by applying one of several painstaking techniques (e.g, stakeholder review or formal modeling). In contrast, end users often live in their domain every day and know it very well, so they often already have an idea about what the requirements, and do not do any extra work to arrive at them, document them, or check them.
However, sometimes end users do not know the requirements in advance and do not aspire to a "design" per se; they may expect these matters to be clarified as the program's implementation evolves (Costabile et al 2006; Fischer and Giaccardi 2006; Morch and Mehandjiev 2000; Segal 2007). (Professional developers sometimes do not know the requirements in advance either, but they are expected to take steps to deal with that situation, such as employing an iterative method that fills in requirements as prototypes evolve, rather than entirely omitting the concept and moving on.) In this case, end-user developers may jump directly into coding without taking the time to document their requirements or look for inconsistencies (Rosson et al 2010). A related situation is that, because of the tight coupling of EUD to a domain, external shifts in the domain can cause evolution in requirements; for example, changes to accounting rules might require a financial analyst to compute different data, which might in turn cause modifications to an existing spreadsheet. Due to its highly iterative nature, EUD requirements-refinement has been likened to a form of highly agile programming (Lieberman et al 2006).
Thus, end-user programmers' requirements tend to be emergent and tightly intertwined with design. Given this, many design approaches that have been targeted toward end-user programmers aim to support evolutionary or exploratory approaches. DENIM is one example (a sketching system for designing web site), which allows users to leave parts of the design in a rough and ambiguous state until that section is better understood (Newman et al 2003). The process of exploratory design can also be assisted by a design critic, which is a software feature that can review a user's design and give suggestions for improvement (Figure 12). For example, Janus is a tool with a visual language enabling users to design floor plans for homes (Fischer et al 1990). It contains a design critic with an extensible expert system that can identify suboptimal combinations of objects in floor plans and suggest revisions to fix those design problems. It also displays a rationale for each suggestion, so that the user can reason about whether and how to apply the advice.
Another approach is for less experienced end-user developers to seek a review from more experienced peers. By identifying short lists of best practices and providing appropriate tools, researchers have tried to make this review as efficient as possible so that it can be applied without greatly slowing the EUD lifecycle (Ronen et al 1989; Powell and Baker 2003; Rosson et al 2008). Such an approach seems most likely to be successful in an organizational setting, where end-user developers have peers that they can call upon (and where the management hierarchy can be used, if appropriate, to mandate and enforce design reviews). Another variant of this idea that has emerged recently is meta-design, a team-of-equals collaborative approach in which professional developers handle some of the design task, and end-user domain experts handle different aspects (Fischer and Giaccardi 2006; Costabile et al 2006).
Researchers have also begun to explore approaches for adapting existing software engineering design techniques to the EUD context. For example, design patterns might be relevant but need adaptation to meet the needs of end-user developers (Diaz et al 2008). Another relatively new approach is the combination of design/specifications with verification capabilities, as with the Topes system discussed earlier (Scaffidi 2009).
Author/Copyright holder: Fischer, Lemke, Mastaglio and Morch, 1990. Copyright terms and licence: All Rights Reserved. Reproduced with permission. See section "Exceptions" in the copyright terms below.
Figure 10.12: Overview of the design critic process, where the user specifies a proposed design/solution, which the design critic feature (right) reviews based on encoded domain knowledge and a model of the user's goal (Fischer et al 1990)
10.4.2 Verification and validation
Verification and/or validation (V&V) cover activities attempting to make sure that a program does what it is supposed to do. Testing is the most common approach for V&V (even among professional developers). One of the first works supporting V&V in EUD was to help users evaluate whether their programs contained bugs by encouraging end users to test strategically. Perhaps the most developed end-user testing approach is "What You See Is What You Test" (WYSIWYT), which guides users through the process of systematically testing spreadsheets (Fisher et al 2006). WYSIWYT employs a "Surprise-Explain-Reward" strategy (Wilson et al 2003), in which surprises such as colored borders attract users' attention to areas of the spreadsheet that need testing, and tool tips explain the colors' meaning and the potential reward in using the testing devices (Figure 13). Behind the scenes, WYSIWYT uses a formal test adequacy criterion to reason about elements of the formulas that have been covered by tests so far.
An alternative approach for finding errors in programs is for the programming tool to automatically look for errors on the basis of types, dimensions, or units (Erwig and Burnett 2002; Abraham and Erwig 2007; Coblenz et al 2005; Chambers and Erwig 2009). This approach can be regarded as specific kinds of assertions. For example, one system associates types with spreadsheet cells (based on the placement of labels at the top of columns and at the left end of rows) and specifies how these types propagate through the spreadsheet (Figure 14). If two cells with different types are combined, then their type is generalized if an applicable type is available (e.g.: "3 apples + 3 oranges = 6 fruit"), or else an error message is shown.
Author/Copyright holder: Burnett, Sheretof, Ren and Rothermel, 2002. Copyright terms and licence: All Rights Reserved. Reproduced with permission. See section "Exceptions" in the copyright terms below.
Figure 10.13: WYSIWYT approach, where checkmarks indicate testedness, question marks indicate that a cell needs testing, and colored borders indicate correctness
Author/Copyright holder: Abraham and Erwig, 2007. Copyright terms and licence: All Rights Reserved. Reproduced with permission. See section "Exceptions" in thecopyright terms below.
Figure 10.14: Using the UCheck feature to test for unit errors in a spreadsheet
10.4.3 Debugging
After a programming error is detected, the next step is to remove it by debugging. Some of the debugging techniques used by professional developers have been adapted for use in EUP tools. In addition to inserting "print" statements that display the value of variables as a program executes, end user developers can step through instructions one at a time, watching for incorrect operations (Leshed et al 2008). Assertions represent another important traditional technique that has been adapted for use in EUP: a user can insert a conditional into the code, and the program will call attention to that point if the conditional evaluates to false at execution (Burnett et al 2003; Koesnandar et al. 2008; Scaffidi 2009).
Several EUP tools provide tight integration between testing and debugging. For example, assertions can be inserted proactively when a program is created, in order to perform automatic tests and initiation of debugging if an assertion fails. For instance, when a web macro is initially created, it might perform properly; however, upon later execution, invalid outputs might arise either because of a bug in the macro itself or because of changes in the structure and content of websites (the macro inputs). An assertion can catch such errors that arise, halt execution, and bring them to the user's attention to prevent the macro from running awry (Figure 15). Several other EUP tools that support testing techniques, such as those mentioned above, also leverage test results to facilitate debugging. For example, once incorrect spreadsheet cells have been identified through testing, dependencies can be traced back automatically to identify and highlight the formulas that are most likely to have caused those erroneous outputs (Ayalew and Mittermeir 2003; Burnett et al 2003).
A new class of debugging tools based on question asking has recently emerged and has proven effective in EUSE. The first tool to take this approach was the Whyline, which was prototyped for the Alice programming environment that enables users to program animations (Ko and Myers 2004). Users execute their program, and when they see a behavior they have a question about, they press a "Why" button. This brings up a menu of "why did" and "why didn't" questions, organized according to the structure of the visible 3D objects manipulated by the program. Once the user selects a question, the system analyzes the program's execution history and generates an answer explaining the error in terms of the events that occurred during execution. The Whyline approach has also been applied to debugging other kinds of programs (e.g, Ko and Myers 2008; Kulesza et al 2009).
Author/Copyright holder: Koesnandar, Elbaum, Rothermel, Hochstein, Scaffidi, and Stolee. Copyright terms and licence: All Rights Reserved. Reproduced with permission. See section "Exceptions" in the copyright terms below.
Figure 10.15: Popup window asking user to indicate whether and how a Robofox web macro should be modified due to a violated assertion
10.4.4 Reuse
After code is written, reuse can speed the creation of later programs. Supporting reuse of end-user programs is challenging because end-user developers rarely have the opportunity or training required to design highly reusable programs. Another challenge is that end-user developers can make mistakes when creating programs or other files for tailoring applications, and reusing these can propagate errors across an organization (Mackay 1990). Therefore, even though systems such as repositories or file servers can make it easy for end-user developers to post programs for others to reuse, it can be extremely difficult and time-consuming for other developers to evaluate the reusability of these programs. To help reduce the difficulty of reusing programs, models of what makes end-user programs reusable are now being developed in the hopes of helping users to search repositories for reusable programs related to the user's particular interests (Scaffidi et al 2010). Outside of repositories, other work has begun to explore how to help users to extract reusable pieces (Oney and Myers 2009).
10.5 The future and implications of EUD
As users continue to grow in number and diversity, EUD is likely to play an increasingly central role in shaping software to meet the broad, varied, rapidly changing needs of the world. Along the way, further research is needed to help end-user developers create and adapt new kinds of programs in new kinds of ways. For example, as the Web 2.0 era unfolds, researchers are investigating new ways of helping users to automate the synthesis of data from multiple websites through web macros and mashups (Scaffidi et al 2008; Zang et al 2008). Another ongoing shift is the rapidly-increasing role of small mobile computers, such as smart phones; work has recently begun on enabling end users to create "apps" or other programs for these devices (Google App Inventor 2010).
With the continually broadening scope and power of end-user programming, substantial additional attention to quality will become increasingly crucial. In particular, as users continue to interact with larger numbers of anonymous peers (e.g, through social networks or "app stores"), their code may become more visible to others and therefore more susceptible to attack. Moreover, since users can now share their programs with any person on the web, many more people could be affected by an error in an end-user programmer's code. Therefore, further research is needed to help end-user developers produce software with stronger guarantees of security and privacy, without interfering with the lightweight, iterative nature of the EUD lifecycle. Moreover, as massive amounts of data become accessible through the web to users, they may need better support for designing and implementing programs with increased scalability. It will be necessary for researchers to develop new approaches, since approaches used by professional software developers, such as buffer-overrun analysis for security or Big-O analysis for performance, may be irrelevant or too complex for the needs of end-user programmers.
More broadly, EUD's continuing development as a social phenomenon has important implications for the relationship between end users and professional software developers (Fischer and Giaccardi 2006, Costabile et al 2006). The rise of EUD to date enables end users to respond to professional developers' backlog of software work, and to the reality that professional software developers are not likely to understand and plan for every user requirement when developing software. With continuing advances in EUSE, end users will not only be able to create a variety of software on their own, but they will also to be able to assess and improve that software's quality on their own—so that they know to what extent to rely upon it, and what to do to increase the software's quality if needed. As a result, the fit between software's form and individual users' needs might be closer than has been possible before, vastly increasing the usefulness of software in peoples' lives.
10.6 Where to learn more
10.6.1 Books
Lieberman, H., Paterno, F., and Wulf, V. (eds.) 2006. End User Development, Springer.
Cypher, A, and Halbert, D. (eds.) 1993. Watch What I Do: Programming By Demonstration, The MIT Press.
Lieberman, H. (ed.) 2001. Your Wish Is My Command: Programming By Example, Morgan Kaufmann.
10.6.2 Relevant conferences and workshops
10.6.2.1 CHI - Human Factors in Computing Systems
20112010200920082007200620052004200320022001200019991998199719961995199419931992199119901989198819871986198519831982
10.6.2.2 VL-HCC - Symposium on Visual Languages and Human Centric Computing
20082007200720062005200420032002200120001999199819971996199519941993199219911990
10.6.2.3 ISEUD - International Symposium on End User Development
Workshops on End-user Software Engineering (WEUSE I, WEUSE II, and WEUSE IV)
ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)
10.6.3 Relevant organizations
End-Users Shaping Effective Software (EUSES) consortium
10.7 References
Abraham, Robin and Erwig, Martin (2007): UCheck: A spreadsheet type checker for end users. In J. Vis. Lang. Comput., 18 (1) pp. 71-95
Abraham, Robin and Erwig, Martin (2004): Header and Unit Inference for Spreadsheets Through Spatial Analyses. In: VL-HCC 2004 - IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing 26-29 September, 2004, Rome, Italy. pp. 165-172
Ayalew, Yirsaw and Mittermeir, Roland (2008): Spreadsheet Debugging. In CoRR, 0
Ayalew, Y. and Mittermeir, R. (2003): Spreadsheet debugging. In: Proceedings of the European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group 2003. pp. 22-23
Blackwell, Alan (2006): Gender in Domestic Programming: from Bricolage to Séances d'Essayage. In: CHI2006 Workshop on End User Software Engineering 2006.
Blackwell, Alan (2004): End-user developers at home. In Communications of the ACM, 47 (9) pp. 65-66
Boal, Augusto (1992): Games for Actors and Non-Actors. Routledge
Boehner, Kirsten, dePaula, Rogerio, Dourish, Paul and Sengers, Phoebe (2007): How emotion is made and measured. In International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 65 (4) pp. 275-291
Boehner, Kirsten, dePaula, Rogerio, Dourish, Paul and Sengers, Phoebe (2005): Affect: from information to interaction. In: Bertelsen, Olav W., Bouvin, Niels Olof, Krogh, Peter Gall and Kyng, Morten (eds.) Proceedings of the 4th Decennial Conference on Critical Computing 2005 August 20-24, 2005, Aarhus, Denmark. pp. 59-68
Brancheau, James C. and Wetherbe, James C. (1987): Key Issues in Information Systems Management. In MIS Quarterly, 11 (1) pp. 23-45
Brancheau, James C., Janz, Brian D. and Wetherbe, James C. (1996): Key Issues in Information Systems Management: 1994-95 SIM Delphi Results. In MIS Quarterly, 20 (2) pp. 225-242
Bricklin, D., Frankston, B. and Fylstra, D. (1979). VisiCalc, Software Arts. Retrieved 31 May 2011 from http://www.bricklin.com/history/intro.htm
Burnett, Margaret M. (2010): End-User Software Engineering and Why it Matters. In JOEUC, 22 (1) pp. 1-22
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