Abstract
Across many domains, end-users need to compose computational elements into novel configurations to perform their day-to-day tasks. End-user composition is a common programming activity performed by such end-users to accomplish this composition task. While there have been many studies on end-user programming, we still need a better understanding of activities involved in end-user composition and environments to support them. In this paper we report a qualitative study of four popular composition environments belonging to diverse application domains, including: Taverna workflow environment for life sciences, Loni Pipeline for brain imaging, SimMan3G for medical simulations and Kepler for scientific simulations. We interview end-users of these environments to explore their experiences while performing common compositions tasks. We use “Content Analysis” technique to analyze these interviews to explore what are the barriers to end-user composition in these domains. Furthermore, our findings show that there are some unique differences in the requirements of naive end-users vs. expert programmers. We believe that not only are these findings useful to improve the quality of end-user composition environments, but they can also help towards development of better end-user composition frameworks.
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Note that ratings used in Table 5 are not absolute. In this qualitative study, their main role was to help the end-users easily express their preferences.
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Acknowledgments
This work is supported in part by the National Security Agency. The views and conclusions contained herein are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the National Security Agency or the U.S. government.
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Dwivedi, V., Herbsleb, J.D., Garlan, D. (2017). What Ails End-User Composition: A Cross-Domain Qualitative Study. In: Barbosa, S., Markopoulos, P., Paternò, F., Stumpf, S., Valtolina, S. (eds) End-User Development. IS-EUD 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10303. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58735-6_5
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