1994swiss D. Szafron and J. Schaeffer, Experimentally Assessing the Usability of Parallel Programming Systems, Programming Environments for Massively Parallel Distributed Systems, Karsten Dekker and Rene Rehmann (editors), Birkhauser Verlag, Basel, Switzerland, 1994, pp. 195-201. abstract or pdf.
Abstract:

This paper discusses an experiment to compare the usability of two parallel programming systems (PPS). In this experiment, half of the students in a graduate parallel and distributed computing course solved a problem using the Enterprise PPS while the other half solved the same problem using a PVM-like library of message-passing routines. The feedback from such experiments is necessary to help narrow the gap between what parallel programmers want and what current PPSs provide.