End-user software engineering

Abstract

End-user programming has become the most common form of programming in use today [2], but there has been little investigation into the dependability of the programs end users create. This is problematic because the dependability of these programs can be very important; in some cases, errors in end-user programs, such as formula errors in spreadsheets, have cost millions of dollars. (For example, see www.theregister.co.uk/content/67/31298.html or panko.cba.hawaii.edu/ssr/Mypapers/whatknow.htm.) We have been investigating ways to address this problem by developing a software engineering paradigm viable for end-user programming, an approach we call end-user software engineering.

References

1. Blackwell, A. First steps in programming: A rationale for attention investment models. In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Human-Centric Computing Languages and Environments (Arlington, VA, Sept. 3--6, 2002), 2--10.
2. Boehm, B. Abts, C., Brown, A., Chulani, S., Clark, B., Horowitz, E., Madachy, R., Reifer, J., and Steece, B. Software Cost Estimation with COCOMO II. Prentice Hall PTR, Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2000.
3. Burnett, M., Cook, C., Pendse, O., Rothermel, G., Summet, J., and Wallace, C. End-user software engineering with assertions in the spreadsheet paradigm. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Engineering (Portland, OR, May 3--10, 2003), 93--103.
4. Burnett, M. and Erwig, M. Visually customizing inference rules about apples and oranges. In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Human-Centric Computing Languages and Environments (Arlington, VA, Sept. 3--6, 2002), 140--148.
5. Fisher, M., Cao, M., Rothermel, G., Cook, C., and Burnett, M. Automated test generation for spreadsheets. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Engineering (Orlando FL, May 2002), 141--151.
6. Frankl, P., and Weyuker, E. An applicable family of data flow criteria. IEEE Trans. Software Engineering 14, 100 (Oct. 1988), 1483--1498.
7. Ko, A. and Myers, B. Development and evaluation of a model of programming errors. In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Human-Centric Computing Languages and Environments (Auckland, NZ, Oct. 28--31), 7--14.
8. Raz, O., Koopman, P., and Shaw, M. Semantic anomaly detection in online data sources. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Engineering (Orlando, FL, May 19--25, 2002), 302--312.
9. Rothermel, G., Burnett, M., Li, L., DuPuis, C., and Sheretov, A. A methodology for testing spreadsheets. ACM Trans. Software Engineering and Methodology 10, 1 (Jan. 2001), 110--147.
10. Ruthruff, J., Creswick, E., Burnett, M., Cook, C., Prabhakararao, S., Fisher II, M., and Main, M. End-user software visualizations for fault localization. In Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Software Visualization (San Diego, CA, June 11--13, 2003), 123--132.
11. Tip, F. A survey of program slicing techniques. J. Programming Languages 3, 3 (1995), 121--189.
12. Wilson, A., Burnett, M., Beckwith, L., Granatir, O., Casburn, L., Cook, C., Durham, M., and Rothermel, G. Harnessing curiosity to increase correctness in end-user programming. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. (Ft. Lauderdale, FL, Apr. 3--10, 2003), 305--312.

Index Terms

• Human-centered computing

  • Human computer interaction (HCI)

• Social and professional topics

  • Professional topics

    • Computing and business

    • Management of computing and information systems

      • Project and people management