What is end-user software engineering and why does it matter?

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. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.