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International Symposium on End User Development

IS-EUD 2009: End-User Development pp 15–28Cite as

What Is End-User Software Engineering and Why Does It Matter?

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 5435))

Abstract

End-user programming has become ubiquitous, so much so that there are more end-user programmers today than there are professional programmers. End-user programming empowers—but to do what? Make really bad decisions based on really bad programs? Enter software engineering’s focus on quality. Considering software quality is necessary, because there is ample evidence that the programs end users create are filled with expensive errors. In this paper, I consider what happens when we add to end-user programming environments considerations of software quality, going beyond the “create a program” aspect of end-user programming. I describe a philosophy to software engineering for end users, and then survey several projects in this area. A basic premise is that end-user software engineering can only succeed to the extent that it respects the fact that the user probably has little expertise or even interest in software engineering.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon, 97331, USA

    Margaret Burnett

Authors
  1. Margaret Burnett
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Siegen, Hölderlinstr. 3, 57068, Siegen, Germany

    Volkmar Pipek

  2. College of Information Sciences and Technology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA

    Mary Beth Rosson

  3. Philips Research Europe, High Tech campus 34 - WB - 5.27, 5656 AE, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    Boris de Ruyter

  4. Faculty of Information System and New Media, University of Siegen, Hölderlinstr. 3, 57068, Siegen, Germany

    Volker Wulf

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© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Burnett, M. (2009). What Is End-User Software Engineering and Why Does It Matter?. In: Pipek, V., Rosson, M.B., de Ruyter, B., Wulf, V. (eds) End-User Development. IS-EUD 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5435. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00427-8_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00427-8_2

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-00425-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-00427-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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