Conceptual Design and Evaluation of WIRE: A Wisdom-Aware EUD Tool

This paper presents the evaluation of the conceptual design of WIRE, a EUD tool for service-based applications. WIRE exploits community composition knowledge harvested from existing programs defined by other developers in the same domain. Such knowledge can assist less skilled developers in defining the composition they need, allowing them to go beyond their individual ca-pabilities. The assistance comes in the form of interactive contextual advices proposed during the definition of composition logic. This idea was evaluated with 10 semi-structured interviews with University accountants. A rich set of information was elicited by means of several probes, including examples of contextual helps, commercial EUD tools, and scenarios in the form of positive and negative user stories. Results informed the definition of a set of require-ments for WIRE, and fostered a critical reflection on possibilities and limita-tions of the general framework of EUD.