A software support to initiate systems engineering students in service-oriented computing

Abstract

An evolutionary process that is currently taking place in the software industry is the shift from developing applications from scratch to discovering and assembling services published in the Internet. This has given birth to a new computing paradigm called service-oriented computing (SOC). We investigated whether simplifying and automating tasks inherent to SOC-based development, while exploiting systems engineering students' experience in earlier paradigms, namely object orientation, reduce the cognitive effort needed to learn SOC. The study involved 38 undergraduate students plus 7 postgraduate students from 4 universities, which attended a course about SOC development models and technologies. Then, they were asked to develop a real-life service-oriented application using two alternatives, namely existing SOC libraries and a software support of our own named EasySOC. EasySOC promotes using common object-oriented design patterns to structure service-oriented applications, facilitates service discovery, and hides many technological details from users. The students were surveyed about their perception on both alternatives using a Likert-based questionnaire. Results show that the students, who had no previous experience in service-oriented notions before the experiment, perceived that EasySOC allows focusing on essential aspects of the paradigm while concealing accidental aspects, and provides adequate support and guidance to bridge the gap.