research-article

Opportunistic programming: how rapid ideation and prototyping occur in practice

Authors:

Joel Brandt,

Philip J. Guo,

Joel Lewenstein,

Scott R. KlemmerAuthors Info & Claims

WEUSE '08: Proceedings of the 4th international workshop on End-user software engineering

Pages 1 - 5

https://doi.org/10.1145/1370847.1370848

Published: 12 May 2008 Publication History

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Abstract

At times, programmers work opportunistically, emphasizing speed and ease of development over code robustness and maintainability. They do this to prototype, ideate, and discover; to understand as quickly as possible what the right solution is. Despite its importance, opportunistic programming remains poorly understood when compared with traditional software engineering. Through fieldwork and a laboratory study, we observed five characteristics of opportunistic programming: Programmers build software from scratch using high-level tools, often add new functionality via copy-and-paste, iterate more rapidly than in traditional development, consider code to be impermanent, and face unique debugging challenges because their applications often comprise many languages and tools composed without upfront design. Based on these characteristics, we discuss future research on tools for debugging, code foraging and reuse, and documentation that are specifically targeted at this style of development.

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Yen RSultanum NZhao J(2024)To Search or To Gen? Exploring the Synergy between Generative AI and Web Search in ProgrammingExtended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613905.3650867(1-8)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613905.3650867
Methfessel PBeckmann TRein PRamson SHirschfeld R(2024)MµSE: Supporting Exploration of Software-Hardware Interactions Through ExamplesProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642186(1-16)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3642186
Nguyen TKiyomitsu HSun YNishida TOhtsuki K(2024)Collaborative Learning in Programming Education with the Programmed Visual Contents Comparison Method2024 12th International Conference on Information and Education Technology (ICIET)10.1109/ICIET60671.2024.10542766(467-471)Online publication date: 18-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICIET60671.2024.10542766
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Index Terms

Opportunistic programming: how rapid ideation and prototyping occur in practice
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Interaction design
    1. Interaction design process and methods
      1. Interface design prototyping
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Development frameworks and environments

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Published In

WEUSE '08: Proceedings of the 4th international workshop on End-user software engineering

May 2008

102 pages

ISBN:9781605580340

DOI:10.1145/1370847

Program Chairs:
Robin Abraham
Microsoft Corporation, USA
,
Margaret Burnett
Oregon State University, USA
,
Mary Shaw
Carnegie Mellon University, USA

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 12 May 2008

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ICSE '08

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ICSE '08: International Conference on Software Engineering

May 12, 2008

Leipzig, Germany

Acceptance Rates

WEUSE '08 Paper Acceptance Rate 20 of 21 submissions, 95%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 20 of 21 submissions, 95%

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2025 IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering

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Cited By

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613905.3650867
Methfessel PBeckmann TRein PRamson SHirschfeld R(2024)MµSE: Supporting Exploration of Software-Hardware Interactions Through ExamplesProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642186(1-16)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
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Nguyen TKiyomitsu HSun YNishida TOhtsuki K(2024)Collaborative Learning in Programming Education with the Programmed Visual Contents Comparison Method2024 12th International Conference on Information and Education Technology (ICIET)10.1109/ICIET60671.2024.10542766(467-471)Online publication date: 18-Mar-2024
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