Software testing is the most time-intensive and resource-intensive aspect of software development. Can support for testing be improved? This case study describes the motivations and design decisions behind the development of the testing tool, CoTester and its deployment to multiple development teams. CoTester outperforms available testing tools by representing tests using an easy-to-understand scripting language and thus making the tests easily editable. The design decisions of the testing tool were derived after conducting a series of interviews with testers and collecting their experiences with manual as well as automated testing. CoTester was developed to support these users, working in an environment of mixed manual and automatic tests, with a progression from manual to automatic testing when circumstances warrant. A series of deployments to four development teams showed that CoTester worked very well for non-professional testers (i.e. those who do testing only part-time), and it was also found to be useful by some professional testers. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Data entry professionals perform lengthy, repetitive tasks by hand, usually without the support of software tools. Since existing generic tools for end user programming were unable to automate data entry tasks, we worked with two data entry professionals on the iterative design and development of a new tool, named CoScripter Tables. The tool was made available within our corporation as a prototype and has been successfully adopted and is in regular use. This paper characterizes the needs of data entry professionals, describes the novel features of our tool, and presents a survey of 16 users which validates its use in a variety of real-world data entry tasks.

Summary form only given. Above showsthat the next generation of mobile applications for MOPs need to be part of a much large mobile information system. Such system should be capable of receiving information from a large number of users, intelligently aggregating the information to useful, meaningful, real-time information and making them available to users. Users should be able to make queries and quickly find information that would enhance their day to day activities. It should also have the functionalities to detect different and unusual situations, provide alerts to users in unusual circumstances and emergencies so that users can respond accordingly. These next generation mobile applications for MOPs will open up a very large market currently estimated to be around 3 billion people [13]. These applications will empower them to be information users as well as information producers. Such applications would result in up lifting of economic conditions of the MOPs and transformation of social processes.

ActionShot is an integrated web browser tool that creates a fine-grained history of users' browsing activities by continually recording their browsing actions at the level of interactions, such as button clicks and entries into form fields. ActionShot provides interfaces to facilitate browsing and searching through this history, sharing portions of the history through established social networking tools such as Facebook, and creating scripts that can be used to repeat previous interactions at a later time. ActionShot can also create short textual summaries for sequences of interactions. In this paper, we describe the ActionShot and our initial explorations of the tool through field deployments within our organization and a lab study. Overall, we found that ActionShot's history features provide value beyond typical browser history interfaces.

Mashups are an increasingly popular way to integrate data from multiple web sites to fit a particular need, but it often requires substantial technical expertise to create them. To lower the barrier for creating mashups, we have extended the CoScripter web automation tool with a spreadsheet-like environment called Vegemite. Our system uses direct-manipulation and programming-by-demonstration tech-niques to automatically populate tables with information collected from various web sites. A particular strength of our approach is its ability to augment a data set with new values computed by a web site, such as determining the driving distance from a particular location to each of the addresses in a data set. An informal user study suggests that Vegemite may enable a wider class of users to address their information needs.

The popularity of the Web has changed the world of end user programming. Our research systems can now be built in a Web browser that millions of people use every day, and we have massive information available. Our users are more experienced and they can share their work with each other. After twenty-five years of trying to infer the user's intent, I will compare early and contemporary end user programming systems to see what progress we have made, and what opportunities we now have for widespread success.

Repositories of code written by end-user programmers are beginning to emerge, but when a piece of code is new or nobody has yet reused it, then current repositories provide users with no information about whether that code might be appropriate for reuse. Addressing this problem requires predicting reusability based on information that exists when a script is created. To provide such a model for web macro scripts, we identified script traits that might plausibly predict reuse, then used IBM CoScripter repository logs to statistically test how well each corresponded to reuse. We then built a machine learning model that combines the useful traits and evaluated how well it can predict four different types of reuse that we saw in the repository logs. Our model was able to predict reuse from a surprisingly small set of traits. It is simple enough to be explained in only 6-11 rules, making it potentially viable for integration in repository search engines for end-user programmers.

Semiotic Engineering uses semiotic theories to characterize human-computer interaction and support research and development of interactive systems. In order to show the value of Semiotic Engineering in design, we illustrate how semiotic concepts have been used in the analysis and generation of redesign alternatives for a web browser-based program called CoScripter. We also discuss how specific perspectives and expectations about the design process can increase the benefit from Semiotic Engineering in design activities, and describe our future steps in this research.

Although a new class of languages has emerged to enable end users to create their own Web applications, little is known about how end-user programmers actually use such languages in the real world. In this paper, we report a field study on over 1400 scripts collected from the Internet which were created by early adopters of CoScripter, a Web macro programming-by-demonstration language. We contrast these Internet scripts with those written by users inside IBM, and describe script usage and re-usage patterns, features used, and users' clever workarounds for features not present in the language. The results show how users grapple with such programming notions as repetition, generalization, and reuse, sometimes inventing their own devices for these. Finally, we discuss the many scripts we found with social implications, whose purposes were to circumvent intended rules, regulations, and usage norm assumptions of a number of Web sites.

We present Koala, a system that enables users to capture, share, automate, and personalize business processes on the web. Koala is a collaborative programming-by-demonstration system that records, edits, and plays back user interactions as pseudo-natural language scripts that are both human- and machine-interpretable. Unlike previous programming by demonstration systems, Koala leverages sloppy programming that interprets pseudo-natural language instructions (as opposed to formal syntactic statements) in the context of a given web page's elements and actions. Koala scripts are automatically stored in the Koalescence wiki, where a community of users can share, run, and collaboratively develop their "how-to" knowledge. Koala also takes advantage of corporate and personal data stores to automatically generalize and instantiate user-specific data, so that scripts created by one user are automatically personalized for others. Our initial experiences suggest that Koala is surprisingly effective at interpreting instructions originally written for people.

Web macros automate interactions with Web sites and related information systems. Though Web macro recorders and players have grown in sophistication over the past decade, these tools cannot yet meet many needs of users in daily life. Based on observations of browser users, we have compiled ten scenarios describing tasks that users would benefit from automating. Our analysis of these scenarios yields specific requirements that Web macro tools should support if those tools are to be applicable to these real-life tasks. Our set of requirements constitutes a benchmark for evaluating tools.

System administrators work with many different tools to manage and fix complex hardware and software infrastructure in a rapidly paced work environment. Through extensive field studies, we observed that they often build and share custom tools for specific tasks that are not supported by vendor tools. Recent trends toward web-based management consoles offer many advantages but put an extra burden on system administrators, as customization requires web programming, which is beyond the skills of many system administrators. To meet their needs, we developed A1, a spreadsheet-based environment with a task-specific system-administration language for quickly creating small tools or migrating existing scripts to run as web portlets. Using A1, system administrators can build spreadsheets to access remote and heterogeneous systems, gather and integrate status data, and orchestrate control of disparate systems in a uniform way. A preliminary user study showed that in just a few hours, system administrators can learn to use A1 to build relatively complex tools from scratch.

Summary form only given. Allen Cypher has been invited to present a retrospective of Stagecast Creator - a visual programming environment for children. Creator enables children to create their own interactive simulations and video games by demonstrating what the characters should do. In addition to being a creativity tool, Creator also teaches children the fundamental concepts behind programming, without burdening them with the syntax and vocabulary of a textual programming language. An important part of the Stagecast Creator project is the built-in tutorial, and Allen will discuss the creation and testing of the tutorial. Researchers who tested Creator in classrooms found significant conceptual problems, and their research led to improvements in the language and tutorial. Stagecast Creator started out as KidSim - a research project by Allen Cypher and David Canfield Smith in Apple's Advanced Technology Group in the early '90s. A version called Cocoa was released by Apple, and Creator finally came out as a product from Stagecast Software, Inc. in 1998. Stagecast Creator is being used today in a variety of schools across the U.S., the U.K., and other countries, and it is popular in computer summer camps. This talk will include an assessment of the successes and shortcomings of Creator from the perspective of a decade of use. Allen will also discuss and compare Creator with other important visual programming environments for children, such as Agentsheets and ToonTalk. For those of you who attended VL'97, this presentation will offer a chance to recall the "1997 Visual Programming Challenge", where several visual languages competed to control robotic toy cars.

KidSim is an environment that allows children to create their own simulations.They create their own characters, and they create rules that specify how the characters are to behave and interact.KidSim is programmed by demonstration, so that users do not need to learn a conventional programming language or scripting language.Informal user studies have shown that children are able to create simulations in KidSim with a minimum of instruction, and that KidSim stimulates their imagination.

Eager is a Programming by Example system for the HyperCard environment.It constantly monitors the user's activities, and when it detects an iterative pattern, it writes a program to complete the iteration.Programming by Example systems create generalized programs from examples provided by the user.They are faced with the problem of how to display these abstract procedures.Eager utilizes a new interface technique, called anticipation, to show how it has generalized: when it detects a repetitive activity, it highlights menus and objects on the screen to indicate what it expects the user to do next.As users continue to perform their activity, they will notice that the objects they are about to select have already been highlighted by the system.When it becomes apparent that Eager knows how to perform the task correctly, they can tell Eager to complete the task for them.The use of anticipation allows Eager to interfere minimally with the users' normal activities.

No abstract available.

Article Demonstrational interfaces: Coming soon? Share on Authors: Brad A. Myers School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PAView Profile , Allen Cypher Apple Computer, Inc. Apple Computer, Inc.View Profile , David Maulsby University of Calgary University of CalgaryView Profile , David C. Smith Apple Computer, Inc. Apple Computer, Inc.View Profile , Ben Shneiderman University of Maryland University of MarylandView Profile Authors Info & Claims CHI '91: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsApril 1991 Pages 393–396https://doi.org/10.1145/108844.108966Published:01 March 1991 10citation335DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations10Total Downloads335Last 12 Months4Last 6 weeks0 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

Our analyses of the activities performed by users of computer systems show complex patterns of interleaved activities. Current human - computer interfaces provide little support for the kinds of problems users encounter when attempting to accomplish several different tasks in a single session. In this paper we develop a framework for discussing the characteristics of activities, in terms of activity structures, and provide a number of conceptual guidelines for developing an interface which supports activity coordination. The concept of a workspace is introduced as a unifying construct for reducing the mental workload when switching tasks, and for supporting contextually-driven interpretations of the users' activity structures.

The k paths problem asks whether it is possible to find k edge-disjoint paths joining k given pairs of vertices in a graph. We show that this problem can be solved in polynomial time for k≤5 if the input graph is k+2 -connected.