WebSystem 11/02/05 by James Dukes

Research about end user web development. Do a 1 to 2 page report.

End-User Developers Errors: Responsible Programming

There are 52 millions end-user developers in the US alone by the 2005 and for every professional software developer there are twenty end-user developers. There are two sides to an end-user developer: a positive side that makes a system work, whether a data base, a web base, spreadsheet, or other applications. An end-user is available, and inexpensive usually an employee of a company or somehow related to the company. The negative side is that end-user developers do not know enough about programming, testing and consequence of an error. End-user developers are learning programming as they are developing systems. How can we ensure what an end-user developer builds is safe and sound? What would be a minimal training requirement?

Who are End User Developers?

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are roughly 100 million information users in the U.S. More interestingly, Sutcliffeis estimates that by 2005 in the U.S. alone, there would be 55 million end-user developers in addition to 2.75 million professional software developers. From the above estimate, one can conclude that one out of five people in the U.S. population (295 million) has to deal with programming issues and write some sort of program. Sutcliffe and Mehandjiev describe that End-user development is about taking control - not only of personalizing computer applications (end-user computing) and writing programs, but of designing new computer-based applications without ever seeing the underlying program code (Sutcliffe, 2004).

See if you can find the references to better understand.

52 million in US are End User developers

for every professional software developers, there are 20 end users

End Users are available and inexpensive, but they aren't as consistent and dependable.

What's the minimal training requirement?

End User Programming

http://www.it.murdoch.edu.au/research/working_papers/IT0301.pdf

Managers have to be aware of the risks of End User Development.

Discuss both benefits and risks involved.

hidden costs of end user development.

We are going from "easy to use" to "easy to develop" software system.

Creating new environments.

There is research to show that end user development grows at more than 10 percent a year worldwide.

http://l3d.cs.colorado.edu/~gerhard/papers/CACM-meta-design.pdf

Because end users don't normally communicate with each other, there may be problems in software compatibility. There are also problems with data validation.
Lack of adequate documentation.
End-user development (EUD) has been a Holy Grail of software tool developers since James Martin launched 4th generation computing environments in the early eighties. Even though there has been considerable success in adaptable and programmable applications, EUD has yet to become a mainstream competitor in the software development marketplace. ( http://giove.cnuce.cnr.it/EUD-NET/pdf/EUDHCI-Sutcliffe.pdf )

work on this or work on program adjustments for midterm.

Sutcliffe, A. Mehandjiev, N. (2004). End-user development: Introduction, Communications of the ACM, 47, 9, 31-32.