Teaching software engineering to end-users

Bioinformatics software is an example of immensely complex and critical scientific software, and this domain provides an excellent illustration of the role of end user computing in the sciences. To explore these interesting characteristics from a software engineering standpoint, we had conducted an exploratory survey of bioinformatics developers. The survey had a range of questions about people, processes and products. As software engineering researchers, we realized that the survey results had important implications for the education of bioinformatics software professionals. Through this paper we intend to open an avenue of discussion about software engineering knowledge that should be taught to end user programmers, based on our findings in the bioinformatics domain. In addition to the survey results we went through the curricula of more than fifty bioinformatics programs as well as the contents of over fifteen textbooks. We observed that there was no mention of the role and importance of software engineering practices essential for creating dependable software systems. We present a set of recommendations for improving bioinformatics education in terms of software engineering principles and ways that they apply in the context of end-user development.