End-User Development, End-User Programming, and End-User Software Engineering PDF

SDU Software Engineering sdu.dk #sdudk End-User Development, End-User Programming, and End-User Software Engineering...

SDU Software Engineering sdu.dk #sdudk End-User Development, End-User Programming, and End-User Software Engineering Thiago Rocha Silva ([email protected]) Associate Professor EUD - Fall 2024 0 6  SDU Software Engineering sdu.dk Context #sdudk In software development, there has always been a tension between those who know what must be developed (subject-matter experts, end users, etc.) and those who know how to develop it (the software developers). End-user development (EUD) aims to solve this problem by empowering end users to design and/or customize the user interface and functionality of software. EUD “scales out” software development activities by enabling a much larger pool of people (the end users) to participate. 0 6  SDU Software Engineering sdu.dk Challenges of EUD #sdudk EUD is inherently different from traditional software development, and trying to support EUD by simply mimicking traditional SE approaches is often insufficient to produce successful results. v End users usually do not have training in professionals’ programming languages, formal development processes, or modeling and diagramming notations. v End users often lack the time or motivation to learn these traditional techniques. v 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. 0 6  SDU Software Engineering sdu.dk Objectives of EUD #sdudk “Providing appropriate tools, social structures, and development processes that are highly usable, quickly learned, and easily integrated into domain practice” (Burnett & Scaffidi, 2024). 0 6  SDU Software Engineering sdu.dk #sdudk “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) Lieberman, H., Paterno, F., and Wulf, V. (eds.) 2006. End User Development, Springer. 0 6  SDU Software Engineering sdu.dk The birth of EUD #sdudk Spreadsheets were the first major EUD programming environment, beginning with VisiCalc, then continuing with Lotus 1-2-3 and Excel. VisiCalc circa 1980. (Courtesy of Dave Winer) 0 6  SDU Software Engineering sdu.dk The birth of EUD #sdudk Users of spreadsheets may not think of themselves as “doing programming”. Spreadsheets, however, are indeed programming environments because their formulas are first-order functional programs (Jones et al., 2003). v The formulas can refer to input “variables” (cell names) and the results of the formulas are computed output values. 0 6  SDU Software Engineering sdu.dk Tailoring #sdudk Tailoring is any “activity to modify a computer application within its context of use” (Won et al., 2006). At the most basic level, tailoring encompasses specifying/adjusting parameters to an existing application in a way that changes its behavior at a high level of granularity. 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. 0 6  SDU Software Engineering sdu.dk Tailoring #sdudk Basic-level tailoring Full-fledged program: Macros in MS Word 0 6  SDU Software Engineering sdu.dk EUD, EUP, and EUSE #sdudk EUD overlaps with two similar concepts: end-user programming (EUP) and end-user software engineering (EUSE). EUP enables end users to create their own programs (Ko et al., 2011). 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. EUP is the most mature from a research and practice perspective. 0 6  SDU Software Engineering sdu.dk EUD, EUP, and EUSE #sdudk EUSE is a more recent area and emphasizes 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. EUD EUSE EUP 0 6  SDU Software Engineering sdu.dk #sdudk End-user programming (EUP) 0 6  SDU Software Engineering sdu.dk End-user programming (EUP) #sdudk EUP is defined as “programming to achieve the result of a program primarily for personal, rather than public use” (Ko et al., 2011). In EUP, the (end-user) developer’s goal is to actually use the program. v 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 (e.g., macros), or new applications that run separately from existing applications. End users can perform EUP through a wide range of interaction styles. 0 6  SDU Software Engineering sdu.dk End-user programming (EUP) #sdudk Source: Ko et al. (2011). 0 6  SDU Software Engineering sdu.dk #sdudk End-user programming (EUP): Interaction Styles 0 6  SDU Software Engineering sdu.dk Programming using visual attributes #sdudk 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: v 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. In a visual language, semantics can be encoded in many attributes of a visual representation, such as position, color, size, and intersection with other shapes. 0 6  SDU Software Engineering sdu.dk Programming using visual attributes #sdudk LabVIEW programming language for creating circuit simulations and other programs. Scratch (Resnick et al., 2009) 0 6  SDU Software Engineering sdu.dk Programming-by-demonstration (PBD) #sdudk Programming-by-demonstration (PBD), sometimes called programming-by- example, is a programming technique whereby the user demonstrates the new program’s logic (or provides some examples), 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. A typical problem is to represent the final program in a form useful to the user to enable the end-user developer to review, test, and debug the program. v PBD is often used in combination with visual or textual languages. 0 6  SDU Software Engineering sdu.dk Programming-by-demonstration (PBD) #sdudk 0 6  SDU Software Engineering sdu.dk Programming-by-example (PBE) #sdudk FlashFill in MS Excel 2013 (Gulwani, 2011) 0 6  SDU Software Engineering sdu.dk Programming-by-specification #sdudk In programming-by-specification, the user describes a desired program, and a tool then generates the program for the user. v For example, natural language → Python (Liu and Lieberman, 2005). 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. Domain-specific languages (DSLs) and forms-based visual interfaces are useful to make the bounds of a tool’s input language more obvious to users. v Users’ specifications are restricted to only those that can actually be handled by the tool. 0 6  SDU Software Engineering sdu.dk Programming-by-specification #sdudk 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). 0 6  SDU Software Engineering sdu.dk Programming with text #sdudk It’s the most traditional interaction technique for programming. v For a time, some believed that this style of programming would not be appropriate for EUP. Most programming environments that support other interaction styles also include text to some extent. Despite the proliferation of alternative interaction styles, text remains widely used because of its conciseness and effectiveness for communicating abstract concepts. 0 6  SDU Software Engineering sdu.dk Programming with text #sdudk CoScripter programming tool to edit a web macro (Scaffidi et al., 2010). 0 6  SDU Software Engineering sdu.dk Frequency of proposed techniques #sdudk Source: Barricellia et al. (2019) 0 6  SDU Software Engineering sdu.dk Typical application domains #sdudk Source: Barricellia et al. (2019) 0 6  SDU Software Engineering sdu.dk #sdudk Mapping of techniques to application domains Source: Barricellia et al. (2019) 0 6  SDU Software Engineering sdu.dk #sdudk End-user software engineering (EUSE) 0 6  SDU Software Engineering sdu.dk End-user software engineering (EUSE) #sdudk 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 because poorly-written software can cause data loss, security breaches, financial loss, or even physical harm. v 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. v Reliability, performance, maintainability, reusability, privacy, security, etc. 0 6  SDU Software Engineering sdu.dk End-user software engineering (EUSE) #sdudk Source: Ko et al. (2011). 0 6  SDU Software Engineering sdu.dk End-user software engineering (EUSE) #sdudk 1) Requirements: How the software should behave in the world. 2) Design and Specifications: How the software behaves internally to achieve the requirements. 3) Reuse: Using preexisting code to save time and avoid errors (including integration, extension, and other perfective maintenance). 4) Testing and Verification: Gaining confidence about correctness and identifying failures. 5) Debugging: Repairing known failures by locating and correcting errors. 0 6  SDU Software Engineering sdu.dk Requirements #sdudk What Should My Program Do? 0 6  SDU Software Engineering sdu.dk Design and Design Specifications #sdudk How Should My Program Work? 0 6  SDU Software Engineering sdu.dk Requirements and design #sdudk Professional developers are expected to investigate, document, and refine requirements before they start to design or code an application. In contrast, end users often live in their domain every day and know it very well, so they often already have an idea about the requirements, and do not do any extra work to arrive at them, document them, or check them. v This makes end-user developers to jump directly into coding without taking the time to document their requirements or look for inconsistencies. v This also makes end-user programmers' requirements to be rather emergent and tightly intertwined with design. v Adapted design partners have been investigated for EUD (Diaz et al., 2008). 0 6  SDU Software Engineering sdu.dk Requirements and design #sdudk Examples of requirements (goals) in EUD include (Ko et al., 2011; Blackwell, 2004; Blackwell, 2006; Rosson et al., 2002): v Personalizing the way that an application or computer behaves v Automating time-consuming tasks v Performing computations that are hard to do accurately by hand v Communicating information 0 6  SDU Software Engineering sdu.dk Requirements and design #sdudk The design critic process (Fischer et al., 1990). 0 6  SDU Software Engineering sdu.dk Verification and Testing #sdudk Is My Program Working Correctly? 0 6  SDU Software Engineering sdu.dk Verification and Testing #sdudk Testing is the most common approach for verification and validation (V&V), even among professional developers. The most developed end-user testing approach is “What You See Is What You Test” (WYSIWYT) for systematically testing spreadsheets (Fisher et al., 2006). v It employs a “Surprise-Explain-Reward” strategy (Wilson et al., 2003): 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. 0 6  SDU Software Engineering sdu.dk Verification and Testing #sdudk WYSIWYT approach, where checkmarks indicate testedness, question marks indicate that a cell needs testing, and coloured borders indicate correctness. 0 6  SDU Software Engineering sdu.dk Verification and Testing #sdudk Another common approach is 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. UCheck 0 6  SDU Software Engineering sdu.dk Debugging #sdudk Why is My Program Not Working? 0 6  SDU Software Engineering sdu.dk Debugging #sdudk Some of the debugging techniques used by professional developers have been adapted for use in EUP tools. Several EUP tools provide tight integration between testing and debugging. v 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. Popup window asking user to indicate whether and how a Robofox web macro should be modified due to a violated assertion. 0 6  SDU Software Engineering sdu.dk Debugging #sdudk The Whyline for Alice. The user has asked why Pac Man failed to resize and the answer shows a visualization of the events that prevented the resize statement from executing (Ko and Myers, 2004). 0 6  SDU Software Engineering sdu.dk Reuse #sdudk What Can I Use to Write My Program? 0 6  SDU Software Engineering sdu.dk Reuse #sdudk Supporting reuse of end-user programs is challenging because end-user developers rarely have the opportunity or training required to design highly reusable programs. v The reuse of end-user developers’ programs can propagate errors across an organization (Mackay, 1990). In EUD, finding, reusing, and even sharing code becomes more opportunistic, as the goals of reuse are more to save time and less to achieve other software qualities. 0 6  SDU Software Engineering sdu.dk Reuse #sdudk Like in professional SE, prior work on reuse for EUD has largely focused on components and APIs. v Consequently, many of the challenges that professionals face, end users face as well. However, while APIs designed for professional use often focus on optimizing flexibility, end users often need much more focused support for achieving their domain-specific goals. 0 6  SDU Software Engineering sdu.dk Future and implications of EUD #sdudk 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. v Emergence of low-code development platforms. With the continually broadening scope and power of EUP, substantial additional attention to quality will become increasingly crucial. 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. 0 6  SDU Software Engineering sdu.dk Further Reading #sdudk Margaret M. Burnett, Christopher Scaffidi, “End-User Development”, Chapter 10, In: The Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction, 2nd Edition. Available at: https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/book/the- encyclopedia-of-human-computer-interaction-2nd-ed/end-user-development Fabio Paternò (2023), “End-user development”, In: Handbook of Human Computer Interaction, pp. 1-27. Cham: Springer International Publishing. 0 6  SDU Software Engineering sdu.dk Further Reading #sdudk Amy J. Ko, Robin Abraham, Laura Beckwith, Alan Blackwell, Margaret Burnett, Martin Erwig, Chris Scaffidi, Joseph Lawrance, Henry Lieberman, Brad Myers, Mary Beth Rosson, Gregg Rothermel, Mary Shaw, Susan Wiedenbeck (2011), “The state of the art in end-user software engineering”, ACM Computing Surveys, 43(3), Article No.: 21, pp. 1–44, ACM. Barbara Rita Barricelli, Fabio Cassano, Daniela Fogli, Antonio Piccinno (2019), “End-user development, end-user programming and end-user software engineering: A systematic mapping study”, Journal of Systems and Software, 149, pp. 101-137, Elsevier. 0 6  SDU Software Engineering sdu.dk #sdudk End-User Development, End-User Programming, and End-User Software Engineering Thiago Rocha Silva ([email protected]) Associate Professor EUD - Fall 2024 0 6