Factors influencing risks and outcomes in end-user development

End-user developed applications introduce many control risks into organizations. Literature suggests that influencing factors include developer experience, design approach, application type, problem complexity, time pressure, and presence or absence of review procedures. The research explores the impacts of different design approaches through two field experiments evaluating the use versus non-use of a structured design methodology when developing complex spreadsheets. Our results indicated that subjects using the methodology showed a significant reduction in the number of “linking errors”, i.e., mistakes in creating links between values that must flow from one area of the spreadsheet to another or from one worksheet to another in a common workbook. We also observed that factors such as gender, application expertise, and workgroup configuration influenced spreadsheet error rates as well