What happened to my application? Helping end users comprehend evolution through variation management

Conclusions: Our survey results show that end users do indeed reuse program variants and suggest that understanding the differences between variants is important. Further, end users prefer running code and looking at outputs, accessing source code and meta information such as filenames, referring to the creation and update dates of programs, and having information on the authors of code. When selecting variants users prefer to look at their major features such as correctness, similarity and authorship information. End users rely primarily on memory to track changes. They seldom make use of online or configuration management tools. Hence, integrated domain-specific variation management tools like AppInventorHelper can significantly help improve users' interactions with the system. A key contribution of our work is a set of design requirements for end-user programming environments that facilitate the management and understanding of the provenance of program variants.