bjbjq Rikke: In this interview we re meeting Profession Margaret Burnett and Assistant
Professor Christopher Scaffidi from Oregon State University. In this interview they will
share their thoughts on the applicability of end-user development and the business value.
What are some of the potential directions and benefits beyond today s implementations
of end-user development in computers? Christopher: So from the standpoint of a company that might
sell an end-user development tool, there is a very big business opportunity. Microsoft
Excel, for instance, is the biggest success story and I believe the latest statistic is
that it s installed on 500,000 desktops worldwide. So that s a massive chunk of the world s computing
mind share. If there s anything that Microsoft has shown us it s that the one who controls
the platform is the one who has strategic advantage. They ve done this with their windows
platform, they try to do it with everything that they do and end-user development tool,
in essence, is a platform because it shapes the way people think about problems and it
provides the resources available for solving those problems. So if you can do it in a way
that actually benefits your users, you may get very large adoption and then that gives
you a strategic advantage for releasing other pieces into that space. Rikke: Can you point
out any major problems of issues in computers regarding the development and implementation
on end-user development? Christopher: Well, one big problem-this is a really serious problem-is
that developing a large platform, for instance, Microsoft Excel, is very expensive. If you
also want to take into account maybe the users during the course of design of that software
and have them co-development the software, then you have to involve them on an ongoing
basis and that also can be pretty expensive. Not just for the corporate partner but also
for the users, that s their time. It takes away from what they can be doing elsewhere
for their own companies or outside of the company, in their own homes and in their lives.
So there s a big expense associated with developing a tool. So one strategy that s often used
is incremental software development where you start out with one basic programming tool
and then maybe you can build an additional tool that goes next to that and then maybe
a more sophisticated tool; just gradually increase the number of tools that are available.
Another strategy is a more iterative process where you provide a very basic version of
all of these very different services. As you learn more about your users needs, then you
add more and more features. So which of these two you chose depends on where the business
value is. If it can be localized in on tool, then the first of these two strategies is
more appropriate. If on the other hand you need at least a basic level of a suite of
services, for instance, the programmable aspects of Windows, then you rather start with a more
iterative development process where you can build up across the entire suite of APIs that
you re aiming to provide to your end-user programmers or profession programmers. Many
of the things I m saying apply also professional programmers. Margaret: In fact, an interesting
point because one of the nice things about studying end-user development is that it gives
you a close magnifying glass at the kinds of problems that people run into when they
are particularly familiar with a platform or with a particular feature or with a particular
style of programming. So some of the research that s come out of our research some of the
advances that have come out of our research and those of other people we know about, is
that, some of the things that we re developed for end-user developers turned out to be valuable
to professional developers as well but people hadn t noticed them before because they hadn
t studied them with the sensitivity toward, Where are people running into stumbling blocks?
So the library and the debugging approach that I mentioned earlier from Dr. Kow, that
actually turned out to be useful for professional developer working the job as well. Christopher:
s amazing how many poor userbility tools there are for professional programmers. But we never
could have gotten away with that with end-user developers. All of the userbility problems
we had to solve in the process of helping end user developers can now be transitioned
by our professional members too. Rikke: Do you have any interesting war stories which
could illustrate the potential pitfalls of designing for end user development? Margaret:
Absolutely. In fact, this is an easy question because there is this very organization that
interested in risks in end-user development and where they ve concentrated is in spreadsheet
risk. So this is the European Spreadsheet Risk Interest Group known as EuSpRIG. They
have a site that has a graph of horror stories and war stories about what happened with spreadsheet
errors and I didn t memorize them all but I brought a little list so I ll tell you a
few of them. Rikke: Excellent Margaret: So one of them that was reported in July 09 was
that shares in a group called the CNC group fell 15 percent after it said the total review
in the four months and June had not risen 3 percent as reported but instead had dropped
5 percent and this turned out to be wrong; it was a spreadsheet error. So this was a
huge problem for them. Another one reported for Nevada City. Here, this was a city budgeting
kind of spreadsheet and what happened is the Nevada City Budget Spreadsheet apparently
worked correctly until sometime in December when the city finance director said it developed
a problem and caused the 2006 budget to show a 5 million dollar deficit which they then
had to do something about and it was just a spreadsheet error. Rikke: Oh really? Margaret:
Yes. Another one from Codec in the vicinity of 10 million dollars. This one is from November
of 05. It says, The hefty 11 million dollars severance error was traced to a faulty spreadsheet.
There were too many zeros added to the employee s accrued severance. So this was a huge error.
These go on and on. I ll just tell you one more because this was a great one. May 05,
this was Virginia Tech University. So in this one a researcher s cut and paste error from
a spreadsheet caused one measure of the region s level of educational attainment to appear
a lot worse than it really was which was very embarrassing. Yet another spreadsheet error.
A lot of these things really illustrate problems that can go wrong when we only focus giving
ways for end-users to create their own software and don t really pay attention to a lot of
the quality attributes that are really important to us which is why end-user development and
end user software engineering are so important as companions to the end-user programming
process. Rikke: I think after this we need some best practicers avoid pitfalls like this
and more stories like this. So you can share any of the best practices and how to implement
them into the computers. Christopher: Well I mentioned a few and in terms of my favorite
advice. One of them, the third one was to try and anticipate the fact that users are
going to make errors and try to reduce the potential impact of those errors. So these
are really good examples. s very good in Microsoft Excel, for instance, to copy and paste a region
of spreadsheet cells and they could be detached from the values that were originally near
to in their original spreadsheet and paste them into another spreadsheet. It s not clear
that when you did so that the formula s hooked up to the right values in the next spreadsheet.
That s a very easy way to make mistakes and there s no indication in the user interface
and you just look at the screen as to how those formulas were connected up. You have
to click on each one of those cells and go around and check them each one individually;
that s not so good. Actually, the tool that Margaret spoke about earlier would actually
help with catching that particular error because of the way that it will allow you to test
the traceability and values through the associations that are made. Margaret: Yeah, there are any
number of tools that are aimed at exactly those kinds of problems. So I just described
one. There are some tools like that, that help people find errors after they happen
and Chris system that he talked about you did talk about it, didn t you? Christopher:
[inaudible 09:04] Margaret: Okay. Chris system also is helpful at finding errors and Chris
system does a very nice thing; it s good at helping to detect certain kinds of errors
and many other researchers in the end-user development space have also looked at preventing
certain kinds of errors. So there is some approaches say, for example, the spreadsheets,
that when you paste things in it, there are certain checks or it won t let you just paste
them it. It says, okay, you have to actually show how this relates to something else before
you can paste it in. So there are a lot of different approaches that are being developed
and so these are approaches that right now are mostly in research and I guess the best
practice for industry would be to read those things because it will save you a lot of trouble.
Christopher: The other thing also is that when you re making a programming tool for
industry, I know that it s really hard to wade through all of the academes and our research
papers, but there are some ideas there that could possibly be adapted for practical use
in development tools. Maybe we as academics need to do a more effective job of communicating
these ideas to that software development companies can incorporate them into the tools that they
re making for mass markets out there. Because mistakes like these are just very common and
some of them could have been prevented if they had occurred within the context of the
research prototype and maybe even caught, but this isn t all flowing out from academia
very efficiently. I also just want to flip it around as well and suggest that software
development companies out in the real world possibly could be communicating to us what
their real needs are, sort of what mistakes they re seeing like these. News Break has
done a fabulous job of communicating these needs back to us in the context of spreadsheets.
We don t know a whole lot about what s going on out there in the context of scripting environments,
small databases, web development tools. There is just a lot of tools out there where people
are trying to use them. We don t really have a very close handle on exactly what the situation
is like when people go and try to use these tools in the real world. So if software development
companies were to say, We want you to help us sell this, this, this, this and this, then
I m sure researchers would get interested in some fraction or another. Margaret: Yeah,
absolutely. We love real data. Christopher: Yeah, we love real data. Rikke: Have you been
involved in some really interesting projects, commercial projects? Christopher: Yes. So
I ve developed several end-user programming environments or end-user development of environments
professionally. I think the one that I like to think back on and most excited about in
retrospect was a tool that we made so that surveys could be deployed into clinics where
drug and alcohol addicts were getting counseled. These surveys were given to the counselees
before each visit or when they visited for each of their counseling sessions and based
on their answers to these questions, statistics were computed in order to trace whether or
not people were getting better as quickly as one would want with the given amount of
treatment. Then that way the people who were counseling them could do decide do they want
to take a different approach, maybe even something besides counseling. Many of the places where
we deployed these surveys wanted to have their own custom surveys or their own custom reports
so we made tools that made it possible to customize all of these things. re really creating
a program because these surveys can contain skip-logic and the formulas that compute the
things like were on the reports are in the programs also. So I m really excited about
that tool because this company now has been successful and they re branched out to things
besides drug and alcohol counseling and it s really a wonderful, big hit. They re still
using that system today, so that makes me they ve builds on it and they ve extended
it and it s a practical success. So I just love that and it s an example of how contextualizing
their tool to a particular domain, providing exactly what they need, can be very beneficial.
Rikke: Thank you so much Margaret and Christopher for sharing some of your thoughts and reflection
on business value and the applicability of end-user development. If you want to know
more, you should a look at our other video interviews with Margaret and Christopher and
you should read that chapter at interactiondesign.org. At our websites you could also find many other
interesting chapters all written by thought-leaders and inventors. Thank you so much for watching.
End-User Development Video 3 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzLZXs-tcAs Business Value - Applicability in Industry
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