Pain Points for Novice Programmers of Ambient Intelligence Systems: An Exploratory Study

This paper presents an exploratory study aimed at identifying the pain points that novice programmers experience, from the software engineering perspective, when developing and deploying smart and distributed systems, that may be classified as Ambient Intelligence (AmI) systems. The exploratory study was conducted among undergraduate students, that worked in groups for developing AmI projects during a university course. Based on their own experiences, individually and as a group, the pain points were identified and prioritized over a common architecture and a set of software development activities. The quantification of the pain points was based on the difficulty level that the students perceived on the development activities and the time they spent completing them. Results represent a starting point for the design of tools and methodologies targeted at overcoming the complexity that novice programmers face when developing AmI systems.