On the Challenges Novice Programmers Experience in Developing IoT Systems: A Survey

The co-existence of various kinds of devices, protocols, architectures, and applications make Internet of Things (IoT) systems complex to develop, even for experienced programmers. When novice programmers are learning to implement these systems, they are required to deal with areas in which they do not have a deep knowledge. Furthermore, besides becoming proficient in these areas separately, they should integrate them and build a system whose components are heterogeneous from both software and hardware perspectives. The accurate understanding of the most challenging issues that novices face is fundamental to envision strategies aimed at easing the development of IoT systems. This paper focuses on identifying such issues in terms of software development tasks that novice programmers encounter when working on IoT systems. To this end, a survey was conducted among 40 novice developers that worked in groups developing IoT systems during several years of a university course. Based on their own experiences, individually and as a group, the most challenging development tasks were identified and prioritized over a common architecture, in terms of difficulty level and efforts. In addition, qualitative data about the causes of these issues was collected and analyzed. Finally, the paper offers critical insights and points out possible future work.