Despite their ability to help with program correctness, assertions have been notoriously unpopular---even with professional programmers. End-user programmers seem even less likely to appreciate the value of assertions; yet end-user programs suffer from serious correctness problems that assertions could help detect. This leads to the following question: can end users be enticed to enter assertions? To investigate this question, we have devised a curiosity-centered approach to eliciting assertions from end users, built on a surprise-explain-reward strategy. Our follow-up work with end-user participants shows that the approach is effective in encouraging end users to enter assertions that help them find errors.

Emerging research has sought to bring effective debugging devices to end-user programmers. This research has largely focused on how well such devices bring genuine “functional ” rewards to end users. However, emerging models of programming behavior indicate that another, often ignored, type of reward—perceivable rewards—can play an equally vital role in how well debugging devices serve end users. Using an empirically evaluated fault localization device, this paper investigates the impact such perceivable rewards can have on end-user debugging. Our results indicate that perceivable rewards alone can significantly improve the effectiveness and understanding of end users performing debugging tasks. 1.

A human-centric issue that has not been considered in the design of end-user programming environments is whether gender differences exist that are important to the design of these environments. Ignoring this issue would miss the opportunity of enhancing the effectiveness of end-user programmers by incorporating appropriate mechanisms to support gender-associated differences in decision making, learning, and problem solving. This paper takes a first step toward building a foundation for investigating this issue by surveying gender difference literature from five domains with an eye toward possible implications for end-user programming. We present a taxonomy of this literature, and derive a number of specific issues for each element of the taxonomy (stated as hypotheses). This foundation provides a starting point for organized investigations into issues that may be important for making breakthroughs in the effectiveness of end-user programmers.

Abstract. Recent research has shown that gender differences exist that influence the ways that males and females work with problem-solving software. These gender differences may put females at a disadvantage in competing for jobs requiring these skills. Earlier research has shown the existence of gender differences in confidence that affects feature usage and adoption; however these findings have raised new questions. We are seeking answers to these questions through qualitative methods. The case study we present here documents our methodology and may be used as a guide for others embarking on similar qualitative analyses. 1

There has been little research into how end-user programming environments can provide explanations that could fill a critical information gap for end-user debuggers – help with debugging strategy. To address this need, we designed and prototyped a video-based approach for explaining debugging strategy, and accompanied it with a text-only approach. We then conducted a qualitative empirical study with end-user debuggers. The results reveal the influences of the explanations on end-user debuggers ’ decision making, how users reacted to the video versus textual media, and the information gaps the explanations closed. The results also reveal issues of particular importance to explanations of this type. 1.

Abstract. End-user programming has become ubiquitous, so much so that there are more end-user programmers today than there are professional programmers. End-user programming empowers—but to do what? Make really bad decisions based on really bad programs? Enter software engineering’s focus on quality. Considering software quality is necessary, because there is ample evidence that the programs end users create are filled with expensive errors. In this paper, I consider what happens when we add to end-user programming environments considerations of software quality, going beyond the “create a program ” aspect of end-user programming. I describe a philosophy to software engineering for end users, and then survey several projects in this area. A basic premise is that end-user software engineering can only succeed to the extent that it respects the fact that the user probably has little expertise or even interest in software engineering. Keywords: End-user software engineering, End-user programming, End-user development. 1