It has been argued that end-user development has been driven by a Essay

It has been argued that end-user development has been driven by a failure of central information systems departments to develop - Essay Example These nonprofessional software developers would be using new writing formulas, queries, databases and spreadsheets to help them in their work. Another research in 2011 foretold the possibility of nonprofessional developers having created twenty five percent business applications by the end of 2014. As for a fact, the number of computer users has increased, and so has the uses for which they need computers. The software needs of these increasing number of computer users are dynamic, complex and diverse. Professional software developers’ limited knowledge and slow development process hamper their capacity to beat the ever-growing applications backlog. This sparked a desire in computer users to look for ways of modifying, creating and extending software artifact on their own without involving professional software developers. This is what end-user development (EUD) is about (Barrie 2002, p.31). Using end-user development, computer users customize or come up with their own unique interfaces and functionality for their software. An advantage with this is the fact that end users have adequate knowledge of the contexts, needs and change in their individual domains. Besides, allowing end-users to tune software to meet required needs, end-user development has another advantage. Clearly, end-users outnumber professional software developers by far. ... Many end-users who engage in end-user development lack sufficient training in professional programming languages, modeling, diagramming notations, and formal processes of software development (Clarker 2008, p.71). Their short-term and medium-term goals do not give them enough motivation to learn this traditional knowledge. This poses several challenges to those devoted to the course of supporting the end-user development. End-users need to develop processes that have ease of use, easy to learn, and that allows easy integration into end-users’ individual domains. End-user development goes hand in hand with tailoring, end-user software engineering, and end-user programming. An end-user who modifies a computer application to suit his or her contextual need does tailoring. Tailoring allows users to change their interaction with an application together with its functionality. This entails changing the behavior of an application by resetting the parameters of an application so as to change the level of detail of its set of data. Tailoring encompasses end-user programming when an individual manipulates an application so much so as to come up with a complete program (Mahmood 2003, p.43). For example, a person can come up with macros that can help him or her to change set graphical user interface items borne in an application. This can serve to either increase the usability of an application or extend it to have new functionalities. There is research that demonstrates the possibility of frameworks that are component-based, and that would allow easy application tailoring. Professional programming seeks to come up with programs and sell them out to people. End-user programming, on the other hand, seeks to create programs to satisfy the developers’ needs. End-user