End-user development

End-user development (EUD) or end-user programming (EUP) refers to activities and tools that allow end-users – people who are not professional software developers – to program computers. People who are not professional developers can use EUD tools to create or modify software artifacts (descriptions of automated behavior) and complex data objects without significant knowledge of a programming language. Various approaches exist, and it is an active research topic within the field of computer science and human-computer interaction. Examples include spreadsheets, scripting languages (particularly in an office suite or art application), and programming by example.

The most popular EUD tool is the spreadsheet. Due to their unrestricted nature, spreadsheets allow relatively un-sophisticated computer users to write programs that represent complex data models, while shielding them from the need to learn lower-level programming languages. Because of their common use in business, spreadsheet skills are among the most beneficial skills for a graduate employee to have, and are therefore the most commonly sought after In the United States of America alone, there are an estimated 13 million end user developers programming with spreadsheets

Early attempts in End-user development were centered on adding simple scripting programming languages to extend and adapt an existing application, such as an office suite.

More recent research tries to bring programming closer to the needs of end users. The Programming by example (PbE) approach reduces the need for the user to learn the abstractions of a classic programming language. The user instead introduces some examples of the desired results or operations that should be performed on the data, and the PbE system infers some abstractions corresponding to a program that produces this output, which the user can refine. New data may then be introduced to the automatically created program, and the user can correct any mistakes made by the program in order to improve its definition.

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