The Fourth Workshop on End-User Software Engineering Robin Abraham
Margaret Burnett
Microsoft Corporation Oregon State University Redmond, WA, U.S.A. Corvallis, OR, U.S.A.
[email protected] [email protected]
Categories and Subject Descriptors
evolutionary prototyping. In most cases, this aspect helps lower the barrier to entry since it is conceptually easier to get started with a concrete program rather than an abstract specification. Moreover, as in professional software engineering, this approach is also more conducive to the programmers figuring out the requirements as they make progress with their program. Given the eclectic mix of users that comprise the target audience, it is necessary for research into end-user software engineering to simultaneously focus on the human aspects, the software engineering aspects, and their subtle interactions. Therefore, it is not surprising that current research in the area of end-user software engineering involves specialists in software engineering, programming languages, humancomputer interaction, empirical studies, education, and cognitive psychology. The Fourth Workshop on End-User Software Engineering is a one-day workshop intended to focus on the challenges faced in helping end users create dependable software. The proposed workshop aims to bring together software engineering researchers who wish to address these challenges. The overarching goal of the workshop is to help build awareness and foster collaborations. The workshop agenda will focus on the following topics. • Techniques, tools, or environments for helping end users design and create dependable software. • Analyses or studies of end-user programming problems in specific end-user programming paradigms. • Empirical studies of end-user programmers and their artifacts. • Exploration of interactions between software engineering and other disciplines applicable to end-user software engineering research.
D.2.5 [Software Engineering]: Testing and Debugging— debugging aids, testing tools; D.2.6 [Software Engineering]: Programming Environments—interactive environments
General Terms Design, Experimentation, Human Factors, Languages
Keywords End-user software engineering, End-user programming
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Mary Shaw Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburg, PA, U.S.A.
[email protected]
WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION
A recent survey has shown that the number of end-user programmers in the United States is 11 million, as compared to only 2.75 million professional programmers [5]. Unlike professional programmers who typically work with generalpurpose programming languages like Java, C++ , and C# , most end-user programmers work with languages and environments such as spreadsheets, web authoring tools, MatLab, and macro languages. The software developed by end users include spreadsheets, dynamic web applications, resource coalitions, scientific simulations, educational simulations, and many others. End users have very different training and background when compared with professional programmers, and few have backgrounds in software engineering practices. End users are unlikely to invest time and effort in learning software engineering techniques and approaches. This is because end users have very different motivations and work constraints than professional programmers. End users are not, in most cases, striving to deliver software. Instead, their focus is on the results of the software. This difference may seem subtle, but the result is that, since the software itself is not viewed as an important asset, there is little perceived need to learn software engineering techniques. Numerous studies have reported that a bulk of the software developed by end users has faults in them (e.g., [3, 4]), and quite a few of these errors result in substantial financial losses to companies and other institutions [1]. The primary challenge for software engineering researchers working in this domain is to find ways to help support end users in their work while respecting these differences. We need to develop approaches that assist end users within the contexts they are familiar with, rather than attempt to train end users to become software engineers [2]. For example, most end-user programming environments are geared towards supporting
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REFERENCES
[1] EuSpRIG. European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group. http://www.eusprig.org/. [2] B. Nardi. A Small Matter of Programming: Perspectives on End-User Computing. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1993. [3] R. R. Panko. What We Know About Spreadsheet Errors. Journal of End User Computing (Special issue on Scaling Up End User Development), 10(2):15–21, 1998. [4] K. Rajalingham, D. Chadwick, B. Knight, and D. Edwards. Quality Control in Spreadsheets: A Software Engineering-Based Approach to Spreadsheet Development. In 33rd Hawaii Int. Conf. on System Sciences, pages 1–9, 2000. [5] C. Scaffidi, M. Shaw, and B. Myers. Estimating the Numbers of End Users and End User Programmers. In IEEE Symp. on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, pages 207–214, 2005.
Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). ICSE’08, May 10–18, 2008, Leipzig, Germany. ACM 978-1-60558-079-1/08/05.
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