End-User Development (EUD) offers lightweight, use-time support which allows end users to configure, adapt and evolve software themselves. As organizations and work practices vary widely and evolve rapidly, the technological infrastructure has to permit and even support these changes. Traditional Software Engineering approaches reach their limits whenever the full spectrum of user requirements cannot be anticipated or the frequency of changes cannot be accommodated by traditional processes. EUD refers to a set of methods, techniques, and tools that allow users acting as non-professional software developers to create, modify or extend a software artifact.
The deployment of Web 2.0 technologies resulted in the exponential growth of the number of end-user developers compared to the number of software professionals. The increasing importance of ‘infrastructural’ aspects of software, particularly the mutual dependencies between technologies, usages, and domain competencies, calls for a differentiation of roles beyond the classical user-designer dichotomy.
The International Symposium on EUD brings together researchers and practitioners from industry and academia working in the field of EUD. While programming activities by non-professional actors are an essential focus, EUD also investigates into related activities within the process of developing a software infrastructure, e.g. the collective understanding and sense-making of use problems and solution alternatives, the interactions among end users around new configurations, and delegation patterns that may also partly involve professional designers. To this end, EUD brings together threads of discussion from disciplines like Human-Computer Interaction, Software Engineering, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Artificial Intelligence. Concepts such as configurability, tailorability, end-user programming, visual programming, natural programming, and programming by example already form a fruitful base, but need to be better integrated to exploit the synergy among them.