Roughly 40 vendors now offer solutions targeted at end users designed to reduce programming efforts. These solutions do not require traditional programming and may be based around relatively narrow functionality, e.g. contract management, customer relationships management, issue and bug tracking. Often referred to as low code development platforms, web based interactions guide a user to develop an application in as little as 40–80 hours.12[circular reference]
Lieberman et al. propose the following definition:13
End-User Development can be defined as 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.
Ko et al. propose the following definition:14
End-user programming is programming to achieve the result of a program primarily for personal, rather [than] public use.
Artifacts defined by end users may be objects describing some automated behavior or control sequence, such as database requests or grammar rules,15 which can be described with programming paradigms such as programming by demonstration, programming with examples, visual programming, or macro generation.16 They can also be parameters that choose between alternative predefined behaviors of an application.17 Other artifacts of end-user development may also refer to the creation of user-generated content such as annotations, which may be or not computationally interpretable (i.e. can be processed by associated automated functions).18
Examples of end-user development include the creation and modification of:
According to Sutcliffe,24 EUD essentially outsources development effort to the end user. Because there is always some effort to learn an EUD tool, the users' motivation depends on their confidence that it will empower their work, save time on the job or raise productivity. In this model, the benefits to users are initially based on marketing, demonstrations and word-of-mouth. Once the technology is put into use, experience of actual benefits becomes the key motivator.
This study defines costs as the sum of:
The first and second costs are incurred once during acquisition, whereas the third and fourth are incurred every time an application is developed. Benefits (which may be perceived or actual) are seen as:
Many end-user development activities are collaborative in nature, including collaboration between professional developers and end-user developers and collaboration among end-user developers.
Mutual development25 is a technique where professional developers and end-user developers work together in creating software solutions. In mutual development, the professional developers often “under design” the system and provide the tools to allow the “owners of problems26" to create the suitable solution at use time for their needs, objectives and situational contexts.27 Then the communication between professional developers and end-user developers can often stimulate formalizing ad hoc modifications by the end users into software artifacts, transforming end-user developed solutions into commercial product features with impacts beyond local solutions.
In this collaboration, various approaches such as the Software Shaping Workshop28 are proposed to bridge the communication gap between professional developers and end-user developers. These approaches often provide translucency according to the social translucence model,29 enabling everyone in the collaboration to be aware of changes made by others and to be held accountable of their actions because of the awareness.
Besides programming collaboration platforms like GitHub, which are mostly utilized by expert developers due to their steep learning curve, collaborations among end-user developers often take place on wiki platforms where the software artifacts created are shared. End-user development is also often used for creating automation scripts or interactive tutorials for sharing “how-to” knowledge. Examples of such application include CoScripter30 and HILC.31 In such applications, user can create scripts for tasks using pseudo-natural language or via programming by demonstration. The users can choose to upload the script to a wiki style repository of scripts. On this wiki, users can browse available scripts and extend existing scripts to support additional parameters, to handle additional conditions or to operate on additional objects.
Online and offline communities of end-user developers have also been formed, where end-user developers can collaboratively solve EUD problems of shared interest or for mutual benefit. In such communities, local experts spread expertise and advice. Community members also provide social support for each other to support the collaborative construction of software.32
Commentators have been concerned that end users do not understand how to test and secure their applications. Warren Harrison, a professor of computer science at Portland State University, wrote:33
It’s simply unfathomable that we could expect security... from the vast majority of software applications out there when they’re written with little, if any, knowledge of generally accepted good practices such as specifying before coding, systematic testing, and so on.... How many X for Complete Idiots (where "X" is your favorite programming language) books are out there? I was initially amused by this trend, but recently I’ve become uneasy thinking about where these dabblers are applying their newfound knowledge.
This viewpoint assumes that all end users are equally naive when it comes to understanding software, although Pliskin and Shoval argue this is not the case, that sophisticated end users are capable of end-user development.34 However, compared with expert programmers, end-user programmers rarely have the time or interest in systematic and disciplined software engineering activities,35 which makes ensuring the quality of the software artifact produced by end-user development particularly challenging.
In response to this, the study of end-user software engineering has emerged. It is concerned with issues beyond end-user development, whereby end users become motivated to consider issues such as reusability, security and verifiability when developing their solutions.36
An alternative scenario is that end users or their consultants employ declarative tools that support rigorous business and security rules at the expense of performance and scalability; tools created using EUD will typically have worse efficiency than those created with professional programming environments. Though separating functionality from efficiency is a valid separation of concerns, it can lead to a situation where end users will complete and document the requirements analysis and prototyping of the tool, without the involvement of business analysts. Thus, users will define the functions required before these experts have a chance to consider the limitations of a specific application or software framework. Senior management support for such end-user initiatives depends on their attitude to existing or potential vendor lock-in.
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