Combination of Low-Code and Pro-Code in Business Software Development

Abstract

Digitalisation is on its way to changing businesses and society more than ever before. Digitalisation is an organisation's adoption of digital or computer technology to gain a competitive advantage; it includes custom-made software development, where demand is overgrowing and exceeding supply. Although manually coding software allows for complete flexibility and customizability to offer optimal coverage of business processes, it can also be a tremendously time- and cost-intensive process. Consequently, new trends now point toward developers writing fewer lines of code. These so-called low-code platforms promise to solve traditional software development challenges and thus alleviate the surplus in demand for custom software development; however, they also present challenges, such as low customizability and vendor lock-in. This paper seeks to analyse the challenges of low-code and pro-code approaches in software development and proposes a decision support framework that fills the gap in research on how these approaches can optimally be combined to mitigate each other's challenges. To identify the challenges of low-code and pro-code, secondary data was gathered through a literature review and primary data through semi-structured interviews with domain experts. With these insights, the framework was designed and developed. Finally, semi-structured interviews were used to evaluate the decision support framework. The results of the evaluation show that it is possible to develop a decision support framework that can help software developer companies to combine low-code with pro-code development approaches to address challenges in business software development. This paper's findings offer essential insights and an effective tool for software development companies as they seek to capitalise on the opportunities offered by combining pro-code and low-code development approaches.