On July 6, 2017, Juan Pablo Sáenz presented the paper Pain Points for Novice Programmers of Ambient Intelligence Systems: an Exploratory Study at the audience of the Symposium on Software Engineering Technologies & Applications (SETA) in the COMPSAC 2017 conference, held in Torino, Italy.

Several challenges emerge for novice programmers when attempting to develop AmI systems. These challenges mainly stem from the fact that AmI systems integrate several subsystems that are heterogeneous from the software and the hardware perspective. Concretely, from the software perspective, each subsystem has its own set of languages, protocols, devices, and communication mechanisms.

The paper presents an exploratory study was conducted among undergraduate students, that worked in groups for developing AmI projects during a university course at the Politecnico di Torino. Based on their own experiences, individually and as a group, the most challenging issues (pain points) were identified and prioritized over a common architecture and a set of software development activities. Results of this exploratory study will guide the design and development of mechanisms (tools and methodologies) targeted at supporting novice programmers in developing Ambient Intelligence systems.

Here are the presentation slides, and the paper can be accessed here.