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MSR 2021
Mon 17 - Wed 19 May 2021
co-located with ICSE 2021
Tue 18 May 2021 03:25 - 03:29 at MSR Room 1 - Technical Debt and Smells Chair(s): Gema Rodríguez-Pérez

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.

Tue 18 May

Displayed time zone: Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna change

03:10 - 04:00
Technical Debt and SmellsTechnical Papers / Data Showcase at MSR Room 1
Chair(s): Gema Rodríguez-Pérez University of Waterloo
03:11
4m
Talk
Technical Debt in the Peer-Review Documentation of R Packages: a rOpenSci Case Study
Technical Papers
Zadia Codabux University of Saskatchewan, Melina Vidoni RMIT University, Fatemeh Hendijani Fard University of British Columbia
Pre-print
03:15
3m
Talk
QScored: A Large Dataset of Code Smells and Quality Metrics
Data Showcase
Tushar Sharma Siemens Research, Marouane Kessentini University of Michigan
Pre-print
03:18
3m
Talk
Architecture Smells and Pareto Principle: A Preliminary Empirical Exploration
Technical Papers
Pre-print
03:21
4m
Talk
Self-Admitted Technical Debt in R Packages: An Exploratory Study
Technical Papers
Melina Vidoni RMIT University
Pre-print
03:25
4m
Full-paper
An Empirical Study of Developer Discussions on Low Code Software Development Challenges
Technical Papers
Md Abdullah Al Alamin University of Calgary, Sanjay Malakar Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, Gias Uddin University of Calgary, Canada, Sadia Afroz Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, Tameem Bin Haider Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, Anindya Iqbal Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology Dhaka, Bangladesh
Pre-print
03:29
31m
Live Q&A
Discussions and Q&A
Technical Papers


Information for Participants
Tue 18 May 2021 03:10 - 04:00 at MSR Room 1 - Technical Debt and Smells Chair(s): Gema Rodríguez-Pérez
Info for room MSR Room 1:

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