End-user software engineering and distributed cognition

Abstract

End-user programmers may not be aware of many software engineering practices that would add greater discipline to their efforts, and even if they are aware of them, these practices may seem too costly (in terms of time) to use. Without taking advantage of at least some of these practices, the software these end users create seems likely to continue to be less reliable than it could be. We are working on several ways of lowering both the perceived and actual costs of systematic software engineering practices, and on making their benefits more visible and immediate. Our approach is to leverage the user's cognitive effort through the use of distributed cognition, in which the system and user collaboratively work systematically to reason about the program the end user is creating. This paper demonstrates this concept with a few of our past efforts, and then presents three of our current efforts in this direction.