End-user Software Engineering

Speaker
Margaret Burnett
Professor, Oregon State University

When
-

Where
Newell-Simon Hall 1305 (Michael Mauldin Auditorium)

Description

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. To help address this problem, we 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.

Speaker's Bio

Margaret Burnett has been involved in HCI aspects of programming language research for many years. She is the principal architect of the Forms/3, a spreadsheet-like research language for exploring the boundaries of the spreadsheet paradigm, and of the FAR multi-paradigm programming language for end users. Most recently her interests have centered on end-user software engineering. Burnett is a past recipient of the National Science Foundation’s Young Investigator Award. She has been a member of the Program Committees for the IEEE Visual Language Symposium, ACM Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, the ACM Conference on Functional Programming, Advanced Visual Interfaces, and several others. She also serves on the Steering Committee for the IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Languages.

Speaker's Website
http://web.engr.oregonstate.edu/~burnett/