Twinkling lights and nested loops: distributed problem solving and spreadsheet development |
| |
| Affiliation: | 1. Department of General Psychology, University of Padova, Italy;2. School of Psychology, Cognition Institute, University of Plymouth, Plymouth, UK;3. School of Psychology, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands;4. School of Psychology, University of Maastricht, Netherlands;5. Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA, USA;1. Department of Computer Science, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan;2. Brain Research Center, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan;3. Department of Electrical Engineering, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan;4. School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore;5. EECS International Graduate Program, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan |
| |
| Abstract: | In contrast to the common view of spreadsheets as “single-user” programs, we have found that spreadsheets offer surprisingly strong support for cooperative development of a wide variety of applications. Ethnographic interviews with spreadsheet users showed that nearly all of the spreadsheets used in the work environments studied were the result of collaborative work by people with different levels of programming and domain expertise. We describe how spreadsheet users cooperate in developing, debugging and using spreadsheets. We examine the properties of spreadsheet software that enable cooperation, arguing that: (1) the division of the spreadsheet into two distinct programming layers permits effective distribution of computational tasks across users with different levels of programming skill; and (2) the spreadsheet's strong visual format for structuring and presenting data supports sharing of domain knowledge among co-workers. |
| |
| Keywords: | |
| 本文献已被 ScienceDirect 等数据库收录！ |
|
