Developer Experience of a Low-Code Platform: An exploratory study

In recent years, low-code development has become increasingly popular, enabling developers to write less code and focus on the objective. However, while proven efficient, little attention has been given to how developers experience working in these development environments. This is significant as providing unpleasant experiences could reduce the benefits of low-code platforms by leaving the developers unhappy. As such, this study aims to gain an understanding of developer experience in low-code environments. The study was conducted with an IT-company recently specialized in low-code solutions, where participants were chosen based on having prior experience with low-code development. This ensued in interviews with six low-code developers as well as a project leader. Main positive experiences found were, feeling more productive, improved customer relations, focus on the objective, shared developer understanding, and quick learnability. Key negative experiences found were, having work constrained, limited freedom and creativity, inadequate documentation, and overview, and having poor and unsafe teamwork capabilities. To the best of my knowledge this is the first study to explore developer experience in low-code development environments and stands as groundwork for future studies in low-code developer experience.