The state of the art in end-user software engineering
By Amy J. Ko, Robin Abraham, L. Beckwith, Alan F. Blackwell, Margaret M. Burnett, Martin Erwig, Christopher Scaffidi, Joseph Lawrance, Henry Lieberman, Brad A. Myers and 4 more. ACM Computing Surveys, 2011
809 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Most programs today are written not by professional software developers, but by people with expertise in other domains working towards goals for which they need computational support. For example, a teacher might write a grading spreadsheet to save time grading, or an interaction designer might use an interface builder to test some user interface design ideas. Although these end-user programmers may not have the same goals as professional developers, they do face many of the same software engineering challenges, including understanding their requirements, as well as making decisions about design, reuse, integration, testing, and debugging. This article summarizes and classifies research on these activities, defining the area of End-User Software Engineering (EUSE) and related terminology. The article then discusses empirical research about end-user software engineering activities and the technologies designed to support them. The article also addresses several crosscutting issues in the design of EUSE tools, including the roles of risk, reward, and domain complexity, and self-efficacy in the design of EUSE tools and the potential of educating users about software engineering principles.
Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Information Systems, Software
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/391235fa417410096740c4a923f71a6711fa0915
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In Information Systems
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In Software
Citations in the corpus
- An Empirical Investigation into Programming Language Syntax (2013, background): “See Kelleher and Pausch [2005] for a comprehensive review of novice programming systems or Ko et al. [2011] for a similar work with end users.”
- Recruiting Participants With Programming Skills: A Comparison of Four Crowdsourcing Platforms and a CS Student Mailing List (2022, background): “There has also been a strong push to make software development easier and more accessible to a wider set of users leading to a focus on how to improve usability for the different groups that engage in programming [30, 38].”
- Why Johnny Can’t Prompt: How Non-AI Experts Try (and Fail) to Design LLM Prompts (2023, background): “This behavior echoes previous fndings that non-experts debug programs opportunistically, rather than systematically [26], and debug ML models haphazardly, rather than strategically [50].”