Closing the gap between designers and developers in a low code ecosystem

Abstract

Nowadays, going digital is a must for a company to thrive and remain competitive. The digital transformation allows companies to react timely and adequately to the constantly evolving markets. This transformation is not without challenges. Among these is the growing demand for skilled software developers. Low-code platforms have risen to mitigate this pressure point by allowing people with non-programming backgrounds to craft digital systems capable of solving business relevant problems. Professional development teams are composed of many different profiles - product owners, analysts, UX and UI designers, front-end and back-end developers, among others. Market competition puts unprecedented demands on the collaboration of these professionals. Current methodologies provide tools and approaches for many of these types of collaboration. However, the reality of established industry practices for UX and UI designers collaborating with front-end developers, still leaves a lot to improve in terms of effectiveness and efficiency. This work developed an innovative approach using model transformation and meta-modelling techniques that drastically improves the efficiency of transforming UX/UI design artefacts into low-code web-technology. The approach has been applied to a recognized and established enterprise-grade low-code platform and evaluated in practice by a team of professional designers and front-end developers. Preliminary practical results show savings between 20 and 75% according to the project complexity in the effort invested by development teams in the above mentioned process.