An ethnographic study of distributed problem solving in spreadsheet development

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. Cooperation among spreadsheet users was spontaneous and casual; users activated existing informal social networks to initiate collaboration.

Finding high-level structures in spreadsheet programs

“…The apparent mismatch between spreadsheet quality and the importance of spreadsheet-based decisions might be due to the fact that spreadsheet-programmers are domain experts but not ITprofessionals. However, we agree with [16] that training of spreadsheet-programmers would be only a partial solution. Well trained spreadsheet-programmers tend to make about the same number of errors in their sheets because they tend to use more complicated and thus more error-prone formulas.…”

Human-Spreadsheet Interaction

“…Consequently, an abundance of research was directed towards enduser programming (EUP), i.e., "programming to achieve the result of a program primarily for personal […] use" [10, p. 4]. Unfortunately, from the point of view of Spreadsheet Readers as Spreadsheet Users But Nardi and Miller noticed another feature of spreadsheets in [15]: they are not "single-user applications". In particular, they are used in the work environment on the one hand as collaboration tool on the other as means of communication to exchange and combine domain knowledge and programming expertise.…”

Applying a User-centered Approach to Interactive Visualisation Design

“…Nardi and Miller [50] used interviews to investigate how spreadsheet users with different programming skills and interests collaborate to develop spreadsheet applications. The focus of the study was to find out how these spreadsheets stimulated collaborative work and structured the problem solving process.…”