“Each to His Own”: Distinguishing Activities, Roles and Artifacts in EUD Practices

End-User Development (EUD) studies how to empower end users (among which, e.g., professionals and organizational workers) to modify, adapt and extend the software systems they daily use, thus coping with the evolving needs of work organizations and their shop-floor environment. This research area is becoming more and more important also for the cross fertilization of ideas and approaches coming from the fields of Information Systems and Human-Computer Interaction. However, if one considers the variety of research proposals stemming from this common ground, there is the risk of losing denotational precision of the key terms adopted in the common vocabulary of EUD. To counteract this natural semantic drift, this paper focuses on three important notions, namely activities, roles, and artifacts, in order to help researchers distinguish important phenomena regarding the “meta-design” of systems built to support EUD practices.