This document discusses software engineering and improving how people build software systems. It mentions requirements, testing, and deployment as key parts of the software engineering process. The rest of the document focuses on end-user programming with spreadsheets, noting that spreadsheets are widely used in business and often form the basis for important decisions, but they can contain errors if they lack documentation or are used by multiple people over many years. The document describes research interviewing spreadsheet users to understand frustrations and likes, then developing tools to help users understand and diagnose spreadsheets based on feedback from real users in practice.

1. Software engineering

3. Understanding and improving how
people build software systems

4. Require
ments
Understanding and improving how
people build software systems

5. Require
ments
Testing
Understanding and improving how
people build software systems

6. Require
ments
Deploy
ment
Testing
Understanding and improving how
people build software systems

7. Require
ments
Deploy
ment
Testing
Understanding and improving how
people build and evolve software systems

9. An estimated 60-80% of developers time
is spent working with existing code

10. My research concerns end-user programmers

11. How did I get this idea?

12. By studying what business does in practice

13. Excel is running companies!

14. 95% of all U.S. firms use spreadsheets for
financial reporting

15. 90% of all analysts in industry perform
calculations in spreadsheets

16. 50% of spreadsheets form the basis for
decisions

17. Only 33% of spreadsheets has
a manual

18. Spreadsheets can have a long life,
5 years on average

19. Average sheet is used by 12 different
people

20. Difficult spreadsheets without
documentation can lead to serious errors

21. The European Spreadsheet Risk Interest
Group (Eusprig) collects horror stories

31. No docs, errors, long life
It looks like software! However...

32. Spreadsheet users lack great tool
support

35. We did not start coding!

36. We performed 27 interviews

37. We asked them:
What annoys you?

38. And what makes you happy?

39. We found that especially support for
understanding spreadsheets was missing

40. Then we started coding

42. We went back to practice

43. “This diagram reminds
me of what I had in
mind when building”

44. “This diagram reminds
me of what I had in
mind when building”
“This makes my job 10
times easier”

48. Users started diagnosing with the dfd’s

51. “That
should be
improved”

52. “This must be
confusing for others”
“That
should be
improved”

53. We went back to practice

54. And collected several ideas for
future work

55. Solving real problems and testing
solutions in practice

65. www.se.ewi.tudelft.nl
www.felienne.com