Expressing the Needs in Smart Home: What is the End Users’ Favorite Way

The Internet of Things (IoT) has witnessed remarkable advancements, enabling smart homes with user-centric features. To effectively articulate their personalized needs, it becomes crucial to equip end users with programming capabilities. Currently, the executable Trigger-Action Programming (TAP) rules have become the mainstream paradigm for IoT end-user programming. To simplify the creation of TAP rules, many studies have proposed various levels of requirements abstraction, yet the connections between them remain unclear. In this paper, we employ a mixed-methods study to identify the preferred way of expressing end users’ requirements in practical scenarios. Subsequently, from the perspective of requirements engineering, we categorize the needs of smart home into three hierarchical levels of abstraction. Accordingly, we propose an innovative multi-level requirements description language called SH-RDL. We also address potential challenges and conduct an evaluation to validate SH-RDL’s usability, understandability and error-prevention. This will aid in the broader adoption of IoT end-user programming.