[Paper Review] An Empirical Study of Developer Discussions on Low-Code Software Development Challenges

Md Abdullah Al Alamin, Sanjay Malakar+4 more|arXiv (Cornell University)|Mar 21, 2021

Software Engineering Research51 references77 citations

TL;DR

This empirical study analyzes 4,600 Stack Overflow posts about nine popular low-code platforms to identify key challenges developers face. Using LDA topic modeling and manual labeling, it reveals that customization—especially dynamic event handling—is the most frequent and hardest-to-solve issue, with 75.9% of related questions lacking accepted answers, highlighting a critical gap in documentation and tooling support.

ABSTRACT

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.

Motivation & Objective

• To understand the types of challenges low-code developers encounter in real-world discussions.
• To identify and categorize recurring topics in low-code development based on actual developer Q&A.
• To assess the difficulty and popularity of specific low-code topics using engagement metrics.
• To inform platform providers, educators, and researchers about critical pain points in low-code adoption.

Proposed method

• Collected 4,600 Stack Overflow posts (questions and accepted answers) using 19 tags related to nine major low-code platforms.
• Applied Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling with K=13 to extract and categorize 13 distinct low-code topics.
• Manually labeled 900 questions to map challenges to SDLC phases (e.g., development, testing).
• Calculated popularity and difficulty metrics: average view count and percentage of questions without accepted answers per topic.
• Used coherence score and manual validation to determine optimal topic count (K=13) for LDA.
• Conducted threat analysis to ensure validity through multi-author labeling and tag validation.

Experimental results

Research questions

• RQ1 What types of topics are discussed about low-code software development (LCSD) on Stack Overflow?
• RQ2 How are these LCSD topics distributed across the software development life cycle (SDLC) phases?
• RQ3 Which LCSD topics are the most difficult to answer, and how do their popularity and difficulty correlate?

Key findings

• Customization of user interfaces and services is the most frequently discussed topic, accounting for 40% of all LCSD-related questions on Stack Overflow.
• The topic 'Dynamic Event Handling' is the most popular (highest average view count) and most difficult, with 75.9% of questions remaining without an accepted answer.
• More than 85% of LCSD-related questions pertain to the development phase, indicating that most challenges arise during active coding and UI design.
• Third-party API integration is the most challenging topic category, while database management is the least difficult to resolve.
• A severe lack of high-quality, tutorial-based documentation is evident, particularly for complex customization tasks.
• Testing challenges are prevalent due to the graphical nature of LCSD platforms, which complicates debugging and automated testing.