Software engineering

Understanding and improving how people build software systems

Understanding and improving how people build software systems

Requirements

Understanding and improving how people build software systems

Testing

Requirements

Understanding and improving how people build software systems

Testing

Deployment

Requirements

Testing

Deployment

Requirements

Understanding and improving how people build and evolve software systems

An estimated 60-80% of developers time is spent working with existing code

My research concerns end-user programmers

How did I get this idea?

By studying what business does in practice

Excel is running companies!

95% of all U.S. firms use spreadsheets for financial reporting

90% of all analysts in industry perform calculations in spreadsheets

50% of spreadsheets form the basis for decisions

Only 33% of spreadsheets has a manual

Spreadsheets can have a long life, 5 years on average

Average sheet is used by 12 different people

Difficult spreadsheets without documentation can lead to serious errors

The European Spreadsheet Risk Interest Group (Eusprig) collects horror stories

No docs, errors, long lifeIt looks like software! However...

Spreadsheet users lack great toolsupport

We did not start coding!

We performed 27 interviews

We asked them:What annoys you?

And what makes you happy?

We found that especially support forunderstanding spreadsheets was

missing

Then we started coding

We went back to practice

“This diagram reminds me of what I had in mind when building”

“This diagram reminds me of what I had in mind when building”

“This makes my job 10 times easier”

Users started diagnosing with the dfd’s

“That should be improved”

“This must be confusing for others”

“That should be improved”

We went back to practice

And collected several ideas for future work

Solving real problems and testingsolutions in practice

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