Software environments for supporting End-User Development

Our work on End-User Development primarily focuses on the needs of a specific community of users, namely professionals in diverse areas outside of computer science, such as engineers, physicians, geologists and physicist, who are not professional programmers. We refer to them as domain experts. We developed a participatory design methodology, called SSW (Software Shaping Workshop) methodology, aimed at designing software environments that support domain experts to become co-designers of their tools. The different stakeholders can contribute their own views on the problem to design, development and maintenance of an application, using their own languages and notations. We also proposed a model of the Interaction and Co-Evolution processes (ICE model) occurring between users and system. It extends a previous model of Human-Computer Interaction by considering an important phenomenon occurring during the use of interactive systems, called co-evolution of users and systems.