End User Development: Approaches Towards a Flexible Software Design

Acknowledging the competition in today’s global markets demands enterprises to be resilient in order to survive. Therefore product life cycles shorten and new customer segments have to be addressed permanently. Obviously, such environments require flexible information systems, which can be adapted quickly to the enterprises’ changing needs, without spending vast amounts of resources. Using End User Development (EUD) approaches can help to solve this dilemma by enabling software developers to create information systems that can even be adapted by technically inexperienced end users. This reduces time and costs needed for adaptations and increases their quality by avoiding potential misunderstandings between business users and IT experts. This paper presents a broad overview of existing EUD approaches. Based on this, it provides recommendations, how EUD design principles can be used conjointly, to develop embedded design environments for end users. We describe and classify EUD approaches taken from the literature, which are suitable approaches for different groups of end users. Implementing the right mixture of EUD approaches leads to embedded design environments, having a gentle slope of complexity. Such environments enable differently skilled end users to perform system adaptations on their own.