Closing the gap between designers and developers in a low code ecosystem

Abstract

Nowadays, going digital is a must for a company to thrive and remain competitive. The digital transformation allows companies to react timely and adequately to the constantly evolving markets. This transformation is not without challenges. Among these is the growing demand for skilled software developers. Low-code platforms have risen to mitigate this pressure point by allowing people with non-programming backgrounds to craft digital systems capable of solving business relevant problems.Professional development teams are composed of many different profiles -product owners, analysts, UX and UI designers, front-end and back-end developers, among others. Market competition puts unprecedented demands on the collaboration of these professionals. Current methodologies provide tools and approaches for many of these types of collaboration. However, the reality of established industry practices for UX and UI designers collaborating with frontend developers, still leaves a lot to improve in terms of effectiveness and efficiency.This work developed an innovative approach using model transformation and meta-modelling techniques that drastically improves the efficiency of transforming UX/UI design artefacts into low-code web-technology. The approach has been applied to a recognized and established enterprise-grade low-code platform and evaluated in practice by a team of professional designers and front-end developers. Preliminary practical results show savings between 20 and 75% according to the project complexity in the effort invested by development teams in the above mentioned process. CCS CONCEPTS• Software and its engineering → Application specific development environments.

Design thinking and computational thinking: a dual process model for addressing design problems

“…In architecture, for example, Frank Gehry has been an advocate of technologies that allow for a Master Model of a building that the whole team can use, and that looks towards fluid movement between these two processes (Gehry et al 2020). Similar support for both processes can be seen in the current generation of tools used by UX/UI designers that explicitly support movement from conceptual designing (e.g., freehand sketching) through to deployment at scale (e.g., automated generation of code; Bexiga et al 2020). Tools of the future may further support the fluid movement between design thinking and computational thinking.…”

Practitioners’ Perceptions on the Adoption of Low Code Development Platforms

“…However, a significant market gap exists among skilled software developers for application development [3]. An option to react to these challenges is to use Low Code Development Platforms (LCDP), which are promoted to increase efficiency, effectiveness, reduce costs, and empower users [4]- [8]. Moreover, LCDP vendors advertise their products as being capable of supporting professional software developers but also developers in the business department or regular business employees (often referred to as citizen developers) who develop applications with little to no programming experience [4]- [6], [9].…”