No half-measures

A study of manual and tool-assisted end-user programming tasks in Excel

Conference paper (2018)

Authors

Rahul Pandita North Carolina State University, Phase Change Software
Chris Parnin North Carolina State University
F.F.J. Hermans Software Engineering - EEMCS
Emerson Murphy-Hill North Carolina State University
Research Group
Software Engineering (EEMCS) (TU Delft)
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Published Date

2018

Language

English

Reuse Rights

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Faculty

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Department

Software Technology

Research Group

Software Engineering

Abstract

The popularity of end-user programming has lead to diverse end-user development environments. Despite accurate and efficient tools available in such environments, end-user programmers often manually complete tasks. What are the consequences of rejecting these tools? In this paper, we answer this question by studying end-user programmers completing four tasks with and without tools. In analyzing 111 solutions to each of these tasks, we observe that neither tool use nor tool rejection was consistently more accurate or efficient. In some cases, tool users took nearly twice as long to solve problems and over-relied on tools, causing errors in 95% of solutions. Compared to manual task completion, the primary benefit of tool use was narrowing the kinds of errors that users made. We also observed that partial tool use can be worse than no tool use at all.

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