EUD4Services 2011 - EUD4Services2011 - 2nd International Workshop on End User Development for Services

The establishment of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm in professional software development is opening new challenging environments for the End-User Development (EUD) community. SOA has produced a large number of reusable software components which can be linked and organised into new applications to satisfy specific business and personal needs. If, on the one hand, SOA provides promising tools for the EUD agenda, so far the SOA approach has been characterised by a very technical attitude with little interest to the final user of the resulting applications. Services have been designed to perform software functionalities which can be connected to each other to perform complex tasks, yet the responsibility for composition and deployment was delegated to expert programmers, who are also assumed to be in charge of designing the interface between services and their users.

The uptake of EUD within the SOA paradigm is hampered by a set of emerging issues, including intrinsic difficulties stemming from the complexity of technology and distributed nature of computations.

The 2nd International Workshop on End User Development for Services focuses on the issues encountered when people who are not software developers attempt to create and compose software services, and on approaches and theories aiming to support such activities. The aim is to establish a community of academics and practitioners working in various fields, including software services, human-computer interaction, software engineering, artificial intelligence, computer-supported cooperative work and innovation management, and facilitate the production of a coherent body of work related to this area. We expect to generate a debate on the potential of SOA for non-technical developers in both professional and personal lives by exploring the challenges of opening up SOA technologies to end-users and ideas on how to facilitate their usage

Workshop Topics

The first workshop devised a number of interesting research topics which foster and guide the focus of the second workshop. The resultant topics for the second workshop include:

Studies of organisational and societal practices involving the development of service-based software systems;
Cognitive and behavioural studies aimed at establishing theories and models related to people attempting to design software services and service-based applications;
Model-informed approaches or tools aiming to facilitate end-user development and design of software services;
Evaluation and comparative studies of tools, approaches and theoretical models in the area of end user development for services.
A subset of the larger questions and issues we want to address during the workshop are the following:

What are the drivers and obstacles to SOA based EUD?
Is EUD for services a specific branch of EUD or just an application?
What is different about software services compared to conventional software, component-based software and distributed software?
To what extend are existing methods and tools for supporting end user developers of conventional software applicable to software services?
Which cognitive models of design are applicable to the design of software services?
Which methods are appropriate for studying the practices of developing software services?
What are the suitable engineering principles and approaches for understanding, designing, developing, and evolving software services by people who are not software professionals?
How can we facilitate uptake of EUD4Services?