Towards A Quality Management System ForEnd-user Application Development

The advent of the personal computer (PC) has brought many significant changes to the application of computers within the everyday workplace. One particular area of change is in the growth of what is termed End-User Computing (EUC). Here non-computer specialists develop their own applications using commonly available PC-based application packages. Without realising it, many end-users are developing what computer professionals would term "software". However, unlike professionally developed software, there has been little emphasis on development methodology or quality management. As a result, end-user developed applications have often contained significant errors in reliability and prove difficult to maintain. With the adoption of Quality Management Systems becoming the norm for the professional computing community, there is now a clear need for end-user developed applications to follow at least, a clear set of similar guidelines, where appropriate. The purpose of this paper is to identify a proposed framework to enable end-users to develop their own software within an overall quality environment. Clearly, such guidelines must be sufficiently rigorous to ensure confidence in the developed software but must not be seen as overly bureaucratic and hence burdensome within a non-computing professional context.