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Should we develop our own software?
So what does this mean going forward? We need end user companies to adopt more innovative approaches such as end user development (EUD) than relying on armies of programmers.
/Programming PR News/ - May 01, 2008 - Well, in many ways we already do exactly this, without necessarily realising it. Creating even the simplest calculations in a spreadsheet results in a software program. The macro recorder feature in MS Word produces "hidden" software code which users can then edit and run. Have you created your own Facebook or Yahoo! page to include live information about weather and football scores? If so, you have composed a software program which executes every time your page is displayed.
The exposure of "unsuspecting end users" to software development will only increase as the tools supporting work, communication and leisure activities become more software-intensive and complex. In interacting with them such users will often cross the boundary from simple interaction to software development, for example from selecting an e-mail address from a list of contacts in our email application to devising e-mail filtering rules. This trend is not on the front pages, yet it does have a name: End User Development (EUD). EUD focuses on enabling users who are not trained programmers to create their own applications.
A recent USA-focused survey estimated the number of end user developers to rise to 12 Million by 2012. Scaling this to UK context produces the impressive number of three Million end user developers.
These figures should not come as a surprise. Early automobiles were driven and maintained by professional chauffeurs, the need for which disappeared with the improvement of car usability. EUD proponents hope that software development tools will improve to the same extent, allowing business users to implement new pricing policies in minutes rather than having to wait a week for their IT department to do this, and then spend another week fixing misunderstandings between business and IT. EUD will enable insurance underwriters to instantly translate that boardroom decision about market segment strategy into discounting rules working within the company's web-based quotation form. The flip-side of this vision is that the potential benefits of such activities may be outweighed by the costs of errors and wasted time.
A group of academics from the Manchester Business School are engaged in a number of EUD-related projects with key industry players, aiming to unravel the issues surrounding the cost-benefit balance of EUD, and to profile this balance for different industry sectors and job positions. For more information or to receive the latest profiling results please visit http://eud.survey.sgizmo.com. The visitor will be invited to provide details about their experiences with end user development and the attitudes to EUD risks and benefits, and will be entered into a draw for a 16GB 'iPod touch', the latest gadget combining personal entertainment and internet technology.
Finally, would a wide take-up of EUD mean the end of professional software development? I wouldn't think so for a moment - the size and technical complexity of many contemporary systems place them well beyond the reach of end user developers (at least for now).
Nikolay Mehandjiev, Senior Lecturer, Manchester Business School
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