The field of end-user development (EUD) has been gaining strength in the past few years as a result of the emergence of a globalized software industry and of the need to build cost-effective software assets. Nowadays, it is impossible to design and implement one-size-fits-all cost-effective systems at a time when software is becoming a commodity. Thus, the future will be dominated by those who can produce composable, extensible, abstract services that can be easily adapted by domain experts to different languages, locales, demographies, industries, use cases, and so on.

This compilation of 17 research and system articles explores ideas about easy-to-develop (in contrast to easy-to-use) software.

Anybody interested in EUD, including developers, academic researchers, or even those merely curious about the latest advances in EUD, will gain valuable insight from this book, which offers the prevalent points of view at different levels of theoretical abstraction, but always anchored in working systems or prototypes.

The content of the articles can be organized along three overlapping areas:

(1) Foundational aspects, including the very definition of EUD. When does development become end-user oriented? In this vein, a few articles describe contrasting frameworks for the whole EUD software life cycle, including support for metadesign and various degrees of system malleability, as well as benchmark design and evaluation strategies for EUD software.

(2) End-user analysis. How do we define the needs and capabilities of an end user? How do we incorporate end user ideation and prototyping in the design of an EUD system?

(3) EUD applications in cloud computing, Internet of Things, social media, gaming, web augmentation, sports, or enterprise innovation.

It is also worth noting that the first article in the book is an update of the Natural Programming Project (NPP) (Carnegie Mellon University), one of the oldest active efforts in EUD (20 years strong). NPP is one of the most mature, established efforts to define programming and debugging paradigms that can be accessible to domain experts.