Computational notebooks to support developers in prototyping IoT systems

• DOI: 10.1016/j.ijhcs.2022.102850
• Publication Date: 2022-05-10T04:36:31Z
• Authors: Fulvio Corno; Luigi De Russis; Juan Pablo Sáenz
• Keywords: Executable; Rapid Prototyping; Code (set theory)

Computational notebooks create narratives that consolidate text, executable code, and visualizations in a single document. They are widely used in data science, enabling data scientists to accurately document and execute the steps of their analyses in an exploratory and iterative manner. Prototyping Internet of Things (IoT) systems is also complex because of IoT heterogeneous and interconnected nature. Indeed, IoT system prototyping spans multiple development and execution environments, and developers, besides focusing on the code, are required to configure various devices. To ascertain if and how computational notebooks' capabilities might be useful in the IoT scenario, this work presents an IoT-tailored notebook architecture aimed at helping developers build and share a computational narrative around the prototyping of IoT systems. To that end, we propose the concept of "IoT notebook", for which we analyze the required features and present its first implementation. We evaluate our proposal by conducting an exploratory user study among non-expert IoT developers working in a large IT company. Finally, we point out the potential of this approach.