An empirical study of users as application developers

A study was conducted in ten organizations of 272 non-DP professionals (“users”) who develop their own administrative computer-based applications. The data are used to create taxonomies of such users and of the applications they develop. Findings concerning the distribution of work time, application development time, relative advantages and disadvantages of user developed applications, and other factors are summarized. Evaluations of user developed applications activity by both users and DP managers are reported, and users' perceptions of importance and satisfaction with 18 different factors related to this activity are analyzed.