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 across the Internet. Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) is a new paradigm that inherits several principles from previous paradigms including object orientation and component-based software. We investigated whether simplifying tasks inherent to SOC-based development, while exploiting systems engineering students´ experience in earlier paradigms reduce the cognitive effort needed to learn the paradigm. 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 development models, i.e. the traditional way to implement the paradigm, and using our EasySOC software support. EasySOC promotes using common object-oriented design patterns to structure service-oriented applications, simplifies service discovery, and hides technological details from developers. The students were surveyed about their perception on both models using a Likert-based questionnaire. Results show that the students, who had no previous experience in service-oriented development before the experiment, perceived that EasySOC allows focusing on essential aspects of the paradigm, while concealing accidental aspects. Then, this study provides empirical evidence about the impact of bridging the gap between the object-oriented and the component-based paradigms, and service-orientation, on teaching how to develop SOC applications in Systems Engineering programs.