Easing IoT Development for Novice Programmers Through Code Recipes

The co-existence of various kinds of devices, protocols, architectures, and programming languages make Internet of Things (IoT) systems complex to develop, even for experienced programmers. Perforce, Software Engineering challenges are even more difficult to address by novice programmers. Previous research focused on identifying the most challenging issues that novice programmers experience when developing IoT systems. The results suggested that the integration of heterogeneous software components is one of the most painful issues, mainly due to the lack of documentation understandable by inexperienced developers, from both conceptual and technical perspectives. In fact, novice programmers devote a significant effort looking for documentation and code samples willing to understand them conceptually, or in the worst case, at least to make them work. Driven by the research question: "How do the lessons learned by IoT novice programmers can be captured, so they become an asset for other novice developers?", in this paper, we introduce Code Recipes. They consist of summarized and well-defined documentation modules, independent from programming languages or run-time environments, by which non-expert programmers can smoothly become familiar with source code, written by other developers that faced similar issues. Through a use case, we show how Code Recipes are a feasible mechanism to support novice IoT programmers in building their IoT systems.