Laura Beckwith

The state of the art in end-user software engineering

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.

Harnessing curiosity to increase correctness in end-user programming

Despite their ability to help with program correctness, assertions have been notoriously unpopular--even with professional programmers. End-user programmers seem even less likely to appreciate the value of assertions; yet end-user programs suffer from serious correctness problems that assertions could help detect. This leads to the following question: can end users be enticed to enter assertions? To investigate this question, we have devised a curiosity-centered approach to eliciting assertions from end users, built on a surprise-explain-reward strategy. Our follow-up work with end-user participants shows that the approach is effective in encouraging end users to enter assertions that help them find errors.

Gender: An Important Factor in End-User Programming Environments?

A human-centric issue that has not been considered in the design of end-user programming environments is whether gender differences exist that are important to the design of these environments. Ignoring this issue would miss the opportunity of enhancing the effectiveness of end-user programmers by incorporating appropriate mechanisms to support gender-associated differences in decision making, learning, and problem solving. This paper takes a first step toward building a foundation for investigating this issue by surveying gender difference literature from five domains with an eye toward possible implications for end-user programming. We present a taxonomy of this literature, and derive a number of specific issues for each element of the taxonomy (stated as hypotheses). This foundation provides a starting point for organized investigations into issues that may be important for making breakthroughs in the effectiveness of end-user programmers

Gender pluralism in problem-solving software

Although there has been significant research into gender regarding educational and workplace practices, there has been little awareness of gender differences as they pertain to software tools, such as spreadsheet applications, that try to support end users in problem-solving tasks. Although such software tools are intended to be gender agnostic, we believe that closer examination of this premise is warranted. Therefore, in this paper, we report an end-to-end investigation into gender differences with spreadsheet software. Our results showed gender differences in feature usage, feature-related confidence, and tinkering (playful exploration) with features. Then, drawing implications from these results, we designed and implemented features for our spreadsheet prototype that took the gender differences into account. The results of an evaluation on this prototype showed improvements for both males and females, and also decreased gender differences in some outcome measures, such as confidence. These results are encouraging, but also open new questions for investigation. We also discuss how our results compare to generalization studies performed with a variety of other software platforms and populations.

Gender HCI: What About the Software?

We use the term gender HCI (human-computer interaction) to refer to research into how software relates to gender differences. Our particular focus is on how gender-neutral software works, not on gender-oriented content. Specifically, we have concentrated on software aimed at supporting everyday users doing problem solving. Several of the hypotheses we developed in the first step of our investigative method predict that in a software environment with problem-solving features, gender differences will have a significant impact on the adoption and use of these features, due at least in part to differences related to risk perception and confidence. To maintain its creative edge, an organization must encourage a diversity of ideas

On to the Real World: Gender and Self-Efficacy in Excel

Although there have been a number of studies of end-user software development tasks, few of them have considered gender issues for real end-user developers in real-world environments for end-user programming. In order to be trusted, the results of such laboratory studies must always be re-evaluated with fewer controls, more closely reflecting real-world conditions. Therefore, the research question in this paper is whether the results of a gender HCI controlled study generalize - to real-world end-user developers, in a real-world spreadsheet environment, using a real-world spreadsheet. Our findings are that the concepts revealed by the original laboratory study appear to be quite robust, being demonstrated in multiple ways in this real-world environment.

Garbage in, garbage out? An empirical look at oracle mistakes by end-user programmers

End-user programmers, because they are human, make mistakes. However, past research has not considered how visual end-user debugging devices could be designed to ameliorate the effects of mistakes. This paper empirically examines oracle mistakes - mistakes users make about which values are right and which are wrong - to reveal differences in how different types of oracle mistakes impact the quality of visual feedback about bugs. We then consider the implications of these empirical results for designers of end-user software engineering environments.

Gender in end-user software engineering

In this paper, we describe research that reports gender differences in usage of software engineering tools by end-user programmers. We connect these findings with possible explanations based on theories from other disciplines, and then add to that our recent results that these differences go deeper than software engineering tool usage to software engineering strategies. We enumerate the strategies that work better for males and the ones that work better for females, and discuss implications and possible directions for follow-up.

Explaining Debugging Strategies to End-User Programmers

A work-in-progress domain-specific language and methodology for modeling complex control systems GUIs is presented. MDA techniques are applied for language design and verification, simulation and prototyping.

Toward Theory-Based End-User Software Engineering

One area of research in the end-user development area is known as end-user software engineering (EUSE). Research in EUSE aims to invent new kinds of technologies that collaborate with end users to improve the quality of their software. EUSE has become an active research area since its birth in the early 2000s, with a large body of literature upon which EUSE researchers can build. However, building upon these works can be difficult when projects lack connections due to an absence of cross-cutting foundations to tie them together. In this chapter, we advocate for stronger theory foundations and show the advantages through three theory-oriented projects: (1) the Explanatory Debugging approach, to help end users debug their intelligent assistants; (2) the GenderMag method, which identifies problems with gender inclusiveness in EUSE tools and other software; and (3) the Idea Garden approach, to help end users to help themselves in overcoming programming barriers. In each of these examples, we show how having a theoretical foundation facilitated generalizing beyond individual tools to the production of general methods and principles for other researchers to directly draw upon in their own works.