End user software engineering: CHI 2007 special interest group meeting

Recently, researchers have been working to bring the benefits of rigorous software engineering methodologies to end users who find themselves in programming situations, to try to make their software more reliable. End users create software whenever they write, for instance, educational simulations, spreadsheets, or dynamic e-business web applications. Unfortunately, errors are pervasive in end-user software, and the resulting impact is sometimes enormous. This special interest group meeting has three purposes: to bring the results of a recent (February 2007) week-long "Dagstuhl" meeting on end-user software engineering to interested researchers at CHI; to incorporate attendees' ideas and feedback into an emerging survey of the state of this interesting new subarea; and generally to bring together the community of researchers who are addressing this topic, with the companies that are creating end-user programming tools.