Scientists tell stories: About seeking help with programming
Brian Frey, Carolyn Budinger Seaman · 2015
End-user software engineers often lack the training, tools, methodologies or other supports common to professional developers. Further, how and where they go for help is unknown. This paper presents results from an interview study where end-user programmer scientists relate, via storytelling, their help seeking behaviors. Our goal is to explore ways that the software engineering community can aid this population. We conducted interviews with seven scientists and two professional developers using storytelling prompts with follow-up questions. Results show that scientists prefer their human help to be proximal both physically and socially. Our analysis suggests that providing human help with specific characteristics, or providing tools and environments that support math-centric perspectives are two potential approaches to increasing the research efficiency of end-user programmer scientists.