%0 Journal Article
%T End User Development: Survey of an Emerging Field for Empowering People
%A Fabio Patern¨°
%J ISRN Software Engineering
%D 2013
%R 10.1155/2013/532659
%X The purpose of this paper is to introduce the motivations behind end user development, discuss its basic concepts and roots, and review the current state of art. Various approaches are discussed and classified in terms of their main features and the technologies and platforms for which they have been developed. Lastly, the paper provides an indication of interesting possibilities for further evolution. 1. Introduction One important trend in software technology is that more and more interactive applications are being written not by professional software developers but by people with expertise in other domains working towards goals supported by computation. Statistics from the US Bureau of Labor and Statistics predicted that by 2012 in the United States, there would be fewer than 3 million professional programmers but more than 55 million people using spreadsheets and databases at work and many writing formulas and queries to support their jobs [1]. More recently, a July 2011 Gartner report indicated that nonprofessional developers will build at least 25 percent of new business applications by 2014. Computer programming, almost as much as computer use, is becoming a widespread, pervasive practice. Such trends were already identified some years ago [2] and are becoming more and more evident. End-User Development (EUD) 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 artefact [3]. End users have specific goals in their own domains, which are not related to software development. The users that we consider here are people who have some basic technological knowledge but are not professional programmers. There are various motivations for EUD: professional developers lack the domain knowledge that end users cannot easily convey when communicating requirements for a new application, and regular development cycles are too slow to meet the usersĄ¯ fast changing requirements. However, since end users usually lack the training of professional software developers, it is simply not possible to use the traditional development approaches for EUD. Currently available applications only realize a fraction of EUDĄ¯s potential and still suffer from several flaws, limiting EUDĄ¯s important contribution to empowering users as active citizens of the information society. The success of the Web 2.0 is a clear indication of how people would like to be more active and creative in the information society. However, Web 2.0 is mainly
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/isrn.software.engineering/2013/532659/