Predicting reuse of end-user web macro scripts

Scaffidi, Christopher; Bogart, Christopher; Burnett, Margaret; Cypher, Allen; Myers, Brad A.; Shaw, Mary

doi:10.1109/vlhcc.2009.5295290

Cited by 7 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…These levels of reuse do not appear to be markedly higher than the level of reuse previously observed in a study of CoScripter web macro reuse [21]. In that study over a 90 day period, only 4% of web macros were ever copied and used to create another macro by any person other than the original macro author.…”

Section: Frequency Of Downloading and Remixingmentioning

confidence: 56%

“…Two of these field studies examined spreadsheet programming; one was an analysis of over 4000 spreadsheets downloaded from the web [5], while the second was a survey of several studies looking at error rates in spreadsheets that companies had created [16]. The other two studies examined web macros (scripts that automate browser actions, for instance to direct the browser to visit a certain URL, to fill out a web form, then to submit it); one study of 120 macros aimed to characterize what kinds of macros were being created [1], while the other study of over 700 macros identified traits that differentiated oft-reused macros from rarely-reused macros [21]. These studies are useful points of comparison because they yielded statistics about the size, complexity and reuse of enduser programs, providing a quantitative basis for assessing how well Scratch is succeeding relative to other end-user programming environments.…”

Section: Background and Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A qualitative study of animation programming in the wild

Dahotre

Zhang

Scaffidi

2010

Proceedings of the 2010 ACM-IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement

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Scratch is the latest iteration in a series of animation tools aimed at teaching programming skills. Scratch, in particular, aims not only to teach technical skills, but also skills related to collaboration and code reuse. In order to assess the strengths and weaknesses of Scratch relative to these goals, we have performed an empirical field study of Scratch animations and associated user comments from the online animation repository. Overall, we found that Scratch represents substantial progress toward its designers' goals, though we also identified several opportunities for significant improvement. In particular, many Scratch programs revealed significant technical mastery of the programming environment by programmers, and some animations even demonstrated design patterns. On the other hand, while the Scratch repository has successfully served as a supportive environment for generating constructive feedback among users, we did not find any occasions within our sample where this interaction led to online collaboration. In addition, we found low levels of code reuse, in terms of both frequency and success. Based on these results, we identify implications for improving the design of animation tools, for using these tools to teach programming skills, and for fostering successful collaboration and code reuse among end-user programmers.

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Section: Frequency Of Downloading and Remixingmentioning

confidence: 56%

Section: Background and Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

A qualitative study of animation programming in the wild

Dahotre

Zhang

Scaffidi

2010

Proceedings of the 2010 ACM-IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement

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“…Pipes is a programming platform for creating mashups of RSS feeds; CoScripter (formerly called Koala) is an environment for creating web macro scripts that automate a browser's interactions with web sites (Little et al, 2007). An empirical study inspected the web macros that end users published in the CoScripter wiki, in order to explore what kinds of macros are commonly shared and reused (Scaffidi et al, 2009). This study discovered that code was much more likely to be reused if it had certain properties (e.g., if the code used variables and never referenced any intranet URLs), what might be termed a "good scent."…”

Section: Empirical Supportmentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond Solo End-User Programming

Scaffidi

2012

International Journal of People-Oriented Programming

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Many end-user programming environments are “reuse environments” that store and organize code so users can extend, adapt, and combine existing code. Yet to date, no well-validated, theory-based body of design principles exists for guiding the development of these reuse environments. The contribution of this survey paper is to identify relevant theoretical perspectives and candidate design principles by which these theories could be extended, adapted, and/or applied to the problem of understanding how and when end-user programmers reuse code. In particular, based on this survey, candidate principles are identified that (1) could be used to guide the design of environments for end-user reuse of code, (2) are grounded in theory, and (3) have preliminary empirical support. This contribution is beneficial because successfully applying these principles could increase the benefit of end-user programming by helping software engineers to deliver effective programming environments to end users.

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At the Confluence of Software Engineeringand Human-Computer Interaction:A Personal Account

Coutaz

2024

The French School of Programming

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Predicting reuse of end-user web macro scripts

Abstract: Repositories of code written by end-user programmers

Cited by 7 publications

References 16 publications

A qualitative study of animation programming in the wild

A qualitative study of animation programming in the wild

Beyond Solo End-User Programming

At the Confluence of Software Engineeringand Human-Computer Interaction:A Personal Account

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