Preface - New perspectives in end-user development: elaborating upon a new research paradigm

Paternò F., Wulf V.

End-User Development 

EUD strives to change the traditional labour organization in the software industry by adding tools for end users to modify existing and to develop new applications. Existing software development cycles are still too slow to quickly respond to rapidly changing user needs of variegated categories of users, and professional developers often lack the needed domain knowledge to address such requirements, especially in pervasive modern applications (Ghiani et al., 2017). End users are generally neither skilled nor interested in adapting their applications at the same level as software professionals. So, EUD tools need to be appropriately crafted at application design time to anticipate technical flexibility that will be needed during their use. New application domains and emerging new technologies drive innovations in EUD. A key question is how to evaluate these innovations. Tetteroo and Markopulos (in this volume) and Ludwig et al. (in this volume) suggest that innovative EUD solutions need to be explored in practice. While laboratory evaluations or short-term rollouts can be found rather frequently in the literature, these methods do not provide a sufficient understanding regarding the appropriation of EUD technologies in social practices and how these technologies should be improved to encourage such practices (Wulf et al., 2017). Tetteroo and Markopulos discuss challenges pertaining to field deployments based on their experiences in the healthcare sector, coming up with some possible guidelines for the evaluation of EUD technologies.

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