We believe concreteness, direct manipulation and responsiveness in a visual programming language increase its usefulness. However, these characteristics present a challenge in generalizing programs for reuse, especially when concrete examples are used as one way of achieving concreteness. In this thesis, we present a technique to solve this problem by...
Exception handling is a general purpose tool found in many modern programming language, but most work to date is based on textual languages. We present an approach to exception handling in a new context, the visual programming language Forms/3. The visual nature of Forms/3 supports an effective approach to exception...
......... ........... .............................. ..... .......... 9
B. Referential transparency .......................... ......................... ..... 9
C. Lost
Declarative visual programming languages (VPLs), including spreadsheets, make up a large portion of both research and commercial VPLs. Spreadsheets in particular enjoy a wide audience, including end users. Unfortunately, spreadsheets and most other declarative VPLs still suffer from some of the problems that have been solved in other languages, such...
Until recently, research has not considered whether the design of end-user programming environments, such as spreadsheets, multimedia authoring languages, and CAD systems, affects males and females differently. As a result, we began investigating how the two genders are impacted by end-user programming software and whether attention to gender differences is...
This thesis presents the results of two studies that investigate the question of what interruption-styles are most appropriate for end-user programmers who are debugging programs. In the studies, end-user programmers are presented with surprises that encourage them to investigate, use, and learn about debugging devices in their programming environment. We...
Spreadsheet languages, which include commercial spreadsheets and various research systems, have proven to be flexible tools in many settings. Research shows, however, that spreadsheets often contain faults. This thesis presents an integrated testing and fault localization methodology for spreadsheets. This methodology allows spreadsheet developers to engage in modeless development,
testing...
Researchers in the Forms/3 group have previously developed the WYSIWYT methodology, exploring a way of systematically testing spreadsheet languages. The previous work presented the WYSIWYT methodology for individual spreadsheet cells, and later partially extended it to large grids in which some cells share the same formula. The Forms/3 spreadsheet language...
Although the need for gender-inclusivity in software itself is gaining attention among both SE researchers and SE practitioners, and methods have been published to help, little has been reported on how to make such methods work in real-world settings. For example, how do busy software practitioners use such methods in...
Emerging research shows that individual differences in how people use technology sometimes cluster by socioeconomic status (SES) and that when technology is not socioeconomically inclusive, low-SES individuals may abandon it. To understand how to improve technology’s SES-inclusivity, we present a multi-phase case study on SocioEconomicMag (SESMag), an emerging inspection method...
How can software practitioners assess whether their software supports diverse users? Although there are empirical processes that can be used to find “inclusivity bugs” piecemeal, what is often needed is a systematic inspection method to assess software’s support for diverse populations. To help fill this gap, this thesis introduces InclusiveMag,...
...................................................... 83
Appendix C: Documents from the Multi-Case Study Teams ..................................... 84