EUD survival "in the wild": Evaluation challenges for field deployments and how to address them

This chapter discusses methodological choices facing researchers wishing to evaluate end user development technologies. While laboratory evaluations or short term evaluations are often conducted as a way to validate an end user development technology, these do not provide sufficient guarantees regarding the adoption of end user development practices and how systems should be improved to encourage such practices. The challenges pertaining to field deployments are discussed first at an operational level and second at a teleological level where we debate what should be success criteria for such studies. Discussing previous studies and our experiences from a deployment case in the healthcare sector, we propose guidelines for the evaluation of EUD technologies.