Developer discussion topics on the adoption and barriers of low code software development platforms

Sadia Afroz T. Haider Gias Uddin + 3 lainnya

21 Maret 2021

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. Our study findings offer implications for low-code practitioners, platform providers, educators, and researchers.

M. Fahmideh M. Akbar Javed Ali Khan + 2 lainnya

2 Mei 2023

Context Software practitioners adopt approaches like DevOps, Scrum, and Waterfall for high-quality software development. However, limited research has been conducted on exploring software development approaches concerning practitioners’ discussions on Q &A forums. Objective We conducted an empirical study to analyze developers’ discussions on Q &A forums to gain insights into software development approaches in practice. Method We analyzed 13,903 developers’ posts across Stack Overflow (SO), Software Engineering Stack Exchange (SESE), and Project Management Stack Exchange (PMSE) forums. A mixed method approach, consisting of the topic modeling technique (i.e., Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA)) and qualitative analysis, is used to identify frequently discussed topics of software development approaches, trends (popular, difficult topics), and the challenges faced by practitioners in adopting different software development approaches. Findings We identified 15 frequently mentioned software development approaches topics on Q &A sites and observed an increase in trends for the top-3 most difficult topics requiring more attention. Finally, our study identified 49 challenges faced by practitioners while deploying various software development approaches, and we subsequently created a thematic map to represent these findings. Conclusions The study findings serve as a useful resource for practitioners to overcome challenges, stay informed about current trends, and ultimately improve the quality of software products they develop.

Longjie Cui Qing Mi Qinghang Bao

6 September 2023

DevOps (i.e., Development and Operations) is a growing concept, which aims to make building, testing, and releasing software faster, more frequent, and more reliable by automating the software delivery and architectural change process. Since DevOps is a relatively new concept, we seek to understand the hot topics in DevOps and the challenges encountered so far. We use data from Stack Overflow (SO), the largest developer question-and-answer platform, to understand the interests and difficulties of DevOps. First, we collected all DevOps-related posts from 2009 to 2022 based on SO tags. Then we used the Latent Dirichlet Allocation model to identify topics, and manually analyzed time trends and hot topics. The results indicate that: (1) DevOps-related issues can be divided into four categories: Container, Pipeline, Configuration, and Deployment; (2) The issues that get more attention are DevOps foundation issues, cloud deployment failure issues, Kubernetes technology usage issues, and DevOps complex environment issues, while the most difficult issues to solve are CI/CD-related issues; (3) DevOps has been introduced since 2009 and the number of questions on the SO platform is growing, especially between 2014 and 2020; (4) The percentage of DevOps-related questions with no accepted answers on the SO platform reached 56.3%. Our results show that problems are evident in terms of complex environments and the lack of experts. Also, developers need to pay more attention to basic theoretical knowledge when they are new to DevOps.

Ricardo Colomo Palacios Saima Rafi Mary-Luz Sánchez-Gordón + 1 lainnya

19 September 2022

Background: DevOps is currently one of the main trends in software development. Low-Code is also an emerging tendency that, combined with DevOps, may offer significant value to software businesses by improving the process. However, how DevOps practices and low-code are combined is little known. Aim: This study aims to understand the practitioner's perspectives on low-code trends. Method: Twelve interviews with IT professionals who deal with low-code in the context of DevOps were conducted. Then, a grounded theory approach was used to theme the interview quotes into emergent categories. Results: The main result of this exploratory study reveals that such an approach is the most common response to the skill shortages of software professionals. Conclusion: This study suggests the emergence of DevOps and low-code could significantly contribute to the development of quality products with low-cost and time.

André C. Hora

1 Mei 2021

Developers often search for software resources on the web. In practice, instead of going directly to websites (e.g., Stack Overflow), they rely on search engines (e.g., Google). Despite this being a common activity, we are not yet aware of what developers search from the perspective of popular software development websites and what search results are returned. With this knowledge, we can understand real-world queries, developers’ needs, and the query impact on the search results. In this paper, we provide an empirical study to understand what developers search on the web and what they find. We assess 1.3M queries to popular programming websites and we perform thousands of queries on Google to explore search results. We find that (i) developers’ queries typically start with keywords (e.g., Python, Android, etc.), are short (3 words), tend to omit functional words, and are similar among each other; (ii) minor changes to queries do not largely affect the Google search results, however, some cosmetic changes may have a non-negligible impact; and (iii) search results are dominated by Stack Overflow, but YouTube is also a relevant source nowadays. We conclude by presenting detailed implications for researchers and developers.