Non-Programmers Composing Software Services: A Confirmatory Study of the Mental Models and Design Challenges

Abstract

Ordinary web users can now create and publish online content. They even venture into “mashups,” integrating information from different sources into a composite information-providing web service. This is a non-trivial design task, which falls into the area of end-user development when the ordinary users who perform it do not have programming education. In this article, we investigate the service design strategies of 12 such ordinary users and compare them against the baseline of 12 programmers. In our think-aloud study, users completed two contrasting types of tasks involved in developing service-based applications: (a) manual service composition and (b) parametric design using templates with a high degree of software support (or assisted composition). These service composition tasks were chosen to differ in respect to the level of user support provided by the tool. Our findings show that non-programmers liked, more than programmers, the template-based parametric design and did not find the tool assistance as constraining as the programmers did. The difficulty of design involved in manual service composition and the absence of user guidance hindered non-programmers in expressing and implementing accurate design solutions. The differences in the mental models and needs of non-programmers are established to be in stark contrast to those of programmers. We used the details of our findings to propose specialized design recommendations for service composition tools aligned with the profiles of their target users.

A Systematic Literature Review on Service Composition for People with Disabilities: Taxonomies, Solutions, and Open Research Challenges

“…In a serviceoriented architecture, the general life cycle of service development consists of a myriad of phases, including service defnition, discovery, selection, invocation, composition, deployment, and monitoring [17][18][19]. Service composition is perhaps the most critical phase in the development cycle where newly added value is produced and ofered to potential consumers through the combination of atomic services [20].…”

“…Overall, the service composition tools were developed to be operated by two main types of users, namely, professional programmers or developers (26 studies, 68.42%) and end-user programmers (15 studies, 39.47%), as shown in Figure 18. End-user programmers refer to ordinary people who have no professional software development education or expertise [20]. Naturally, they are nontechnical users or domain experts.…”