Communicability issues on PaaS application development

Abstract

Platform as a Service (PaaS) is becoming a differential product for big technology companies. It delivers hardware, software tools and other resources for application development and hosting, as a service. Its users are developers who need to build and deploy new applications. Besides computational power, PaaS environments (PaaSE) offer services, development tools or even complete apps to be putted together in final applications. These pieces of software can be developed by different parties, presenting a significant challenge from the HCI perspective. Semiotic Engineering (SemEng) views HCI as computer-mediated communication between designers and users at interaction time. In the PaaS context, several designers communicate with PaaSE's users (developers). In this paper, we apply SemEng concepts to analyze diverse software artifacts involved, showing evidence of communication breakdowns between designers and users. Our goal is to provide a better understanding of existing metacommunication processes in PaaSE, offering specific suggestions to emphasize communication boundaries.