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End-user software engineering
Professor Margaret Burnett

This event took place on 28th June 2005 at 1:00pm (12:00 GMT)
Knowledge Media Institute, Berrill Building, The Open University, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom, MK7 6AA

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.

The webcast was open to 100 users

Click below to play the event (62 minutes)

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