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User Participation in Evolutionary Development
User Participation in
Evolutionary Development
Anders Mørch
InterMedia
University of Oslo
[email protected]
www.intermedia.uio.no
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User Participation in Evolutionary Development
Keywords from previous presentations
• Natural programming
• Gardening metaphor
• Runtime tailorability
• Domain-expert users
• From abstract to concrete
• From concrete to abstract
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User Participation in Evolutionary Development
Outline
• User participation in development
• Evolution as guiding principle
– From natural to artificial evolution
– End users as initiators of evolutionary change
• Level of abstraction appropriate for user
participation (gardening metaphor)
• Past work
• Planned work
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User Participation in Evolutionary Development
User participation in development
• User participation in Scandinavian system
development has been about how to involve
users in the early stages of development
(analysis and design) and evaluation
• This is appropriate for easy-to-use systems
• One of the main EUD-Net goal is to move
from easy-to-use to easy-to-develop systems
• Our interest: Users as active participants in
the further development of existing systems
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User Participation in Evolutionary Development
Natural evolution as guiding principle
• Evolution by incrementally making small
changes to existing systems over long time
works remarkably well
• A step beyond ”one shot” framework
instantiation (e.g. spreadsheet development)
• Principles of natural evolution have been
successfully adopted in many other domains
(building architecture, evolution of everyday tools, etc)
• Two levels of evolution: species and individual
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User Participation in Evolutionary Development
Two kinds of natural evolution
• Phylogenetic evolution: The evolution of
species (our gene pool; the gene pool of trees)
• Ontogenetic evolution: The evolution of an
individual member of a species (you and me;
the tree outside the building we’re in)
• Hypothesis: Natural evolution can serve as
analogy to identify and explain differences
between two kinds of software evolution
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User Participation in Evolutionary Development
Two kinds of software evolution
• Programming language evolution: The
evolution of programming languages (e.g.,
Simula 67 => C++ => Java)
• Program evolution: The evolution of an
individual member (a program, an application)
created from a programming language
(Word 1 => Word 4.0 => Word 97, etc.)
• Program evolution was first (seriously) treated by Lehman and Belady (IBM OS/360)
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User Participation in Evolutionary Development
Layers of program
code in an application
Domain-oriented
extensions
Generic extensions
Each layer can be implemented in
the same (or a different) language
Tailorable generic application
Application integration framework
Program evolution
Program evolution
and programming
language evolution
Programming languages
Visual programming
languages (VPL)
Scripting languages
Object-oriented languages
Binary languages (e.g. Java bytcode)
Language evolution
(E.g. HDL1 => HDL2 => HDL3
Simula 67 => C++ => Java)
Hardware description languages (HDL)
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User Participation in Evolutionary Development
From natural to artificial evolution
• NL works by two basic mechanisms: genetic
variation and natural selection
• Genetic variation is a micro level mechanism
that can cause permanent (inheritable) change
in an organism
• Natural selection is a macro mechanism that
is caused by external (environmental) factors
• The mechanisms are outside the reach of
individuals and create a micro/macro gap
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User Participation in Evolutionary Development
Narrowing the micro/macro gap of NL
Unit of
adaptation
macro
intermediate
micro
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Natural selection
Individuals
participation
Genetic variation
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User Participation in Evolutionary Development
Going too far is bypassing the issue?
Unit of
adaptation
selection
macro
intermediate
Participation?
micro
variation
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User Participation in Evolutionary Development
Shortening the variation-selection loop
Variation
Genetic/
Random
Deliberated
Selection
Artificial
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Natural
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User Participation in Evolutionary Development
Adopting evolutionary perspectives to EUD
• Goal: users as active participants as creators
of evolutionary change
• User participation requirements:
– unit of variation should approximate unit of
selection
– unit of selection should approximate unit of use
• Designer perspective :
– Artificial selection
– Deliberated variation
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User Participation in Evolutionary Development
Analogical solution (and metaphor)
• “Gardening” as analogical solution
• Why: Gardening provides a level of
abstraction that is suitable for user
participation
• Two literal examples :
– “Pruning” as metaphor for artificial selection
– “Grafting” as metaphor for deliberated variation
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User Participation in Evolutionary Development
Artificial selection: Pruning a bonsai tree
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User Participation in Evolutionary Development
Deliberated variation:
Grafting and budding a fruit tree
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User Participation in Evolutionary Development
Past work at UiO: End-user tailoring
• Techniques for deliberated variation
(”application grafting”) :
– customization
– integration
– extension
• Application units as basic building blocks
• Application unit goes beyond GUI objects by
providing access to levels of an application
below the user interface
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User Participation in Evolutionary Development
Evolving BasicDraw into KitchenDesign
• Example: How to build a specialized drawing
Customization
Integration
Extension
program from a generic program ?
BasicDraw
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KitchenDesign
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User Participation in Evolutionary Development
Exposing aspects below the user interface
2
1
shiftMouseDown
altMouseDown
1b
ctrlMouseDown
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User Participation in Evolutionary Development
Planned work
• Tools and techniques for artificial selection
(“application pruning”) :
– intervention
– de-coupling
– conservation
• Component-based systems with embedded
“gardening” tools
• Artificial selection as abstraction mechanism
for turning components “off” during execution
to cope with superfluous functionality growth
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User Participation in Evolutionary Development
References
• An elaborated version of this presentation
can be found in the following paper:
Mørch, A.I. Evolutionary Growth and Control in User Tailorable
Systems. In Adaptive Evolutionary Information Systems. N.
Patel (ed.). Idea Group Publishing, 2002.
(may take time to download ..)
http://www.intermedia.uio.no/ansatte/morch/research/publications/ead/02Chap.pdf
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