In this talk, we will consider what happens when we add to end-user programming environments consideration of the software lifecycle beyond the "coding" phase. Considering other phases seems necessary, because there is ample evidence that end users' programs are filled with errors.
The EUSES Consortium is a new NSF consortium of researchers who are working on this problem. As part of this consortium, several of my colleagues and I have been working on a holistic approach to software engineering for end users. It incorporates support for testing, fault localization, and assertions, in an incremental manner integrated in a fine-grained way with the environment. The software engineering knowledge is in the system, and the user is not expected to have expertise in software engineering. In this talk, I will focus primarily on how testing and assertions are supported as part of this approach, including our "Surprise-Explain-Reward" strategy for motivating end users to employ these software engineering devices.
About the speaker:
Margaret Burnett, Professor, Oregon State University
Margaret Burnett has been involved in HCI aspects of programming for many years. She is the principal architect of Forms/3, a spreadsheet-like research language for exploring the boundaries of the spreadsheet paradigm, and of the FAR multi-paradigm programming language for end users. Most recently her interests have centered on end-user software engineering. Burnett is a past recipient of the National Science Foundation's Young Investigator Award. She has been a member of the Program Committees for the IEEE Visual Language Symposium, ACM Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, the ACM Symposium on Software Visualization, Advanced Visual Interfaces, and several others. She is also Project Director of the NSF-funded EUSES Consortium, a group of researchers from Oregon State University, Carnegie Mellon University, Drexel University, University of Nebraska, Pennsylvania State University, and Cambridge University, who are working together to help End Users Shape Effective Software.
Contact information:
Margaret Burnett
School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Oregon State University