“Each to his own”: Distinguishing activities, roles and Artifacts in EUD practices

Abstract

End-User Development (EUD) studies how to empower end users (among which, e.g., professionals and organizational workers) to modify, adapt and extend the software systems they daily use, thus coping with the evolving needs of their work organizations and the shop-floor environment. This research area is becoming increasingly important also for the cross fertilization of ideas and approaches that come from the fields of Information Systems and Human-Computer Interaction. However, if one considers the variety of research proposals stemming from this common ground, there is the risk of losing denotational precision of the key terms adopted in the common vocabulary of EUD. To counteract this natural semantic drift, the objective of this paper is to distinguish within three EUD complementary important notions, namely activities, roles, and artifacts, in order to help researchers deepen important phenomena regarding the ‘‘metadesign’’ of systems built to support EUD practices.