[论文解读] 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 Research参考文献 51被引用 77

一句话总结

本实证研究分析了关于九种主流低代码平台的4,600篇Stack Overflow帖子，以识别开发者面临的关键挑战。通过LDA主题建模与人工标注，研究发现自定义——尤其是动态事件处理——是最常见且最难解决的问题，其中75.9%的相关问题未获得被采纳的答案，凸显了文档和工具支持方面存在重大缺口。

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.

研究动机与目标

• 理解低代码开发者在真实讨论中遇到的挑战类型。
• 基于实际开发者问答，识别并分类低代码开发中的重复性主题。
• 利用参与度指标评估特定低代码主题的难度与受欢迎程度。
• 为平台提供商、教育工作者和研究人员提供低代码采用过程中关键痛点的参考信息。

提出的方法

• 使用与九个主要低代码平台相关的19个标签，收集了4,600篇Stack Overflow帖子（问题及被采纳的答案）。
• 应用潜在狄利克雷分布（LDA）主题建模，K=13，以提取并分类13个不同的低代码主题。
• 人工标注900个问题，以将挑战映射至软件开发生命周期（SDLC）阶段（如开发、测试）。
• 计算流行度与难度指标：每个主题的平均浏览量及无被采纳答案的问题占比。
• 使用一致性得分与人工验证确定LDA最优主题数（K=13）。
• 开展威胁分析，通过多作者标注与标签验证确保研究有效性。

实验结果

研究问题

• RQ1 在Stack Overflow上，关于低代码软件开发（LCSD）的讨论涉及哪些主题？
• RQ2 这些LCSD主题在软件开发生命周期（SDLC）各阶段如何分布？
• RQ3 哪些LCSD主题最难回答？其受欢迎程度与难度之间是否存在相关性？

主要发现

• 用户界面与服务的自定义是讨论最频繁的主题，占所有LCSD相关问题的40%。
• ‘动态事件处理’主题最受欢迎（平均浏览量最高）且最难解决，75.9%的问题未获得被采纳答案。
• 超过85%的LCSD相关问题涉及开发阶段，表明大多数挑战出现在编码与UI设计过程中。
• 第三方API集成是挑战最大的主题类别，而数据库管理是最容易解决的。
• 高质量、以教程为导向的文档严重缺乏，尤其在复杂自定义任务方面。
• 由于低代码平台的图形化特性，测试挑战普遍存在，这使得调试与自动化测试变得复杂。