Low-code software development (LCSD) is an emerging paradigm that combines minimal source code with interactive graphical interfaces to promote rapid application development. LCSD aims to democratize application development to software practitioners with diverse backgrounds. Given that LCSD is relatively a new paradigm, it is vital to learn about the challenges developers face during their adoption of LCSD platforms. The online developer forum, Stack Overflow (SO), is popular among software developers to ask for solutions to their technical problems. We observe a growing body of posts in SO with discussions of LCSD platforms. In this paper, we present an empirical study of around 5K SO posts (questions + accepted answers) that contain discussions of nine popular LCSD platforms. We apply topic modeling on the posts to determine the types of topics discussed. We find 13 topics related to LCSD in SO. The 13 topics are grouped into four categories: Customization, Platform Adoption, Database Management, and Third-Party Integration. More than 40% of the questions are about customization, i.e., developers frequently face challenges with customizing user interfaces or services offered by LCSD platforms. The topic "Dynamic Event Handling" under the "Customization" category is the most popular (in terms of average view counts per question of the topic) as well as the most difficult. It means that developers frequently search for customization solutions such as how to attach dynamic events to a form in low-code UI, yet most (75.9%) of their questions remain without an accepted answer. We manually label 900 questions from the posts to determine the prevalence of the topics' challenges across LCSD phases. We find that most of the questions are related to the development phase, and low-code developers also face challenges with automated testing.
翻译:低码软件开发(LCSD)是一个新兴范例,将最低源代码和互动图形界面结合起来,以促进快速应用程序开发。 LCSD旨在将应用程序开发民主化,使其适用于具有不同背景的软件从业人员。鉴于LCSD是一个相对较新的范例,因此了解开发者在采用LCSD平台时所面临的挑战至关重要。在线开发者论坛Stack Overflow(SO)在软件开发者中很受欢迎,要求解决其技术问题。我们看到SO中越来越多的职位与LCSD平台讨论。在本文中,我们介绍了约5KSO(问题+可接受的答案)的实证研究,该5KSO(问题+公认的答案)包含9个流行的LCSD平台的讨论。我们用主题模型模型来确定所讨论主题的类型。我们在SODDS平台平台上发现13个专题分为四类:自定义、平台采用、数据库管理、第三方整合。超过40%的问题涉及定制化,也就是说,开发者经常面临来自LCSDSDSD平台定制用户界面或服务的挑战。在LSDSDSDSDSDSerview 中, 最难的测试阶段中,我们通常选择了“CSergin ” 的“Cretovidudududududududududududududududucalalald ” 和“Sildalde lade lade lade lade lad lad ladaldalde lade lex lade lex ladald