Back to list of 2001/02 seminars

     
End-user Software Engineering
Tuesday 16 October 2001 16:00 Brian Spratt Room
     
Professor Margaret Burnett
Oregon State University
  Abstract

Tools and environments to enable end users to "program" are becoming increasingly popular. The best known such environment is the spreadsheet, and the way users program in this type of environment is by providing formulas.

In this talk, we will consider what happens when we add to end-user programming environments consideration of elements of the software engineering lifecycle beyond coding. Doing so seems necessary, because there is ample evidence that end users' programs are no more reliable than those written by professional software engineers. My colleagues and I have been developing a holistic approach to software engineering for end users. It incorporates support for testing, finding bugs, maintenance, and requirements specification. The software engineering knowledge needed is in the system, and the user is not expected to develop expertise at software engineering; instead, the strategy is for the system to provide guidance to the user. In the talk, I will focus primarily on how testing is supported in our approach through a methodology we term the "What You See Is What You Test (WYSIWYT)" methodology.

 UKC Department People Courses Search Research Publications


http://www.cs.ukc.ac.uk/dept_info/seminars/2001_02/abs.2001.10.16.html
Last modified Monday October 22 11:53:13 BST 2001
Problems with this page? Contact the CS Webmaster