Reflections over Communicability in PaaS Environments

Abstract

Platform as a Service (PaaS) has become an essential product for large technology companies. It is a way of delivering 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 and even complete apps to be put together in web applications. These pieces of software can be developed by diverse groups of people, presenting a significant challenge from a Human-Centric Computer (HCC) perspective. We argue that the semiotic engineering (SemEng) theory, which views human-computer interaction as computer-mediated communication between designers and users at interaction time, may be applied to help creating knowledge in this context. In PaaSE, several designers communicate with PaaSE’s users (developers). In this paper, we apply SemEng concepts to analyze different software artifacts present in PaaSE, showing evidence of communication breakdowns between designers and users. Our goal is to provide a better understanding of existing metacommunication processes in such environments, offering specific suggestions to emphasize communication boundaries.