This article presents two main contributions. First, it notes that the primary weakness
of WEUSE is not the tools, visual languages or development techniques, but the
absence of a software lifecycle supported by a framework to guide users through all
the development activities and phases. End users without basic software development
knowledge do not address the entire development process and have need of support,
especially in the requirements, analysis and design/implementation activities, to tell
them what they have to do and how to do it. A software development assistant is
obviously useful for users without programming skills, but this paper evidences that
users are generally unable to develop applications without such an assistant. Second,
this article puts forward aWEUSE lifecycle and presents a support framework that has
been demonstrated to be valid. The reported experiment shows that the better results
in response to RQ2 can be attributed to the inclusion of a software lifecycle tailored for
end users and support software to guide users through the lifecycle, which is what distinguishes
the RQ1 and RQ2 studies. This was confirmed when the sample was divided
into two groups that were familiar with the tool and they were set a new problem: the
group that did not use the framework failed again, whereas the group that did use the
framework was just as successful as when they were acquainted with the problem.