Foraging Among an Overabundance of Similar Variants
End-User Programming
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Ragavan, Sruti Srinivasa
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Kuttal, Sandeep Kaur
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Hill, Charles
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Sarma, Anita
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Piorkowski, David
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Burnett, Margaret
Proceedings of the ACM CHI'16 Conference on Human Factors in Computing
Systems
2016-05-07
v.1
p.3509-3521
© Copyright 2016 ACM
Summary: Foraging among too many variants of the same artifact can be problematic
when many of these variants are similar. This situation, which is largely
overlooked in the literature, is commonplace in several types of creative
tasks, one of which is exploratory programming. In this paper, we investigate
how novice programmers forage through similar variants. Based on our results,
we propose a refinement to Information Foraging Theory (IFT) to include
constructs about variation foraging behavior, and propose refinements to
computational models of IFT to better account for foraging among variants.
On the benefits of providing versioning support for end users: An empirical
study
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Kuttal, Sandeep K.
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Sarma, Anita
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Rothermel, Gregg
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction
2014-02
v.21
n.2
p.9
© Copyright 2014 ACM
Summary: End users with little formal programming background are creating software in
many different forms, including spreadsheets, web macros, and web mashups. Web
mashups are particularly popular because they are relatively easy to create,
and because many programming environments that support their creation are
available. These programming environments, however, provide no support for
tracking versions or provenance of mashups. We believe that versioning support
can help end users create, understand, and debug mashups. To investigate this
belief, we have added versioning support to a popular wire-oriented mashup
environment, Yahoo! Pipes. Our enhanced environment, which we call "Pipes
Plumber," automatically retains versions of pipes and provides an interface
with which pipe programmers can browse histories of pipes and retrieve specific
versions. We have conducted two studies of this environment: an exploratory
study and a larger controlled experiment. Our results provide evidence that
versioning helps pipe programmers create and debug mashups. Subsequent
qualitative results provide further insights into the barriers faced by pipe
programmers, the support for reuse provided by our approach, and the support
for debugging provided.
Debugging support for end user mashup programming
Papers: novel programming
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Kuttal, Sandeep Kaur
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Sarma, Anita
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Rothermel, Gregg
Proceedings of ACM CHI 2013 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
2013-04-27
v.1
p.1609-1618
© Copyright 2013 ACM
Summary: Programming for the web can be an intimidating task, particularly for
non-professional ("end-user") programmers. Mashup programming environments
attempt to remedy this by providing support for such programming. It is well
known, however, that mashup programmers create applications that contain bugs.
Furthermore, mashup programmers learn from examples and reuse other mashups,
which causes bugs to propagate to other mashups. In this paper we classify the
bugs that occur in a large corpus of Yahoo! Pipes mashups. We describe support
we have implemented in the Yahoo! Pipes environment to provide automatic error
detection techniques that help mashup programmers localize and correct these
bugs. We present the results of a think-aloud study comparing the experiences
of end-user mashup programmers using and not using our support. Our results
show that our debugging enhancements do help these programmers localize and
correct bugs more effectively and efficiently.
