Emerging New Roles for Low-Code Software Development Platforms

Low- and no-code development platforms have introduced two new development roles: the platform engineer and the citizen developer. While the former are still software developers who implement the low- and no-code platforms, the latter use them to develop their domain applications. In practice, however, we believe that the citizen developer role is shared by two people. For example, in the teaching domain, the citizen developer role is shared between a teacher and his assistant. The first is the domain practitioner, while the second is the domain engineer. The Domain Engineer uses the development platform to create a tailored platform for the teacher, who uses it to create an application that will be for his students, the end users. To explore the possibility of differentiate these two roles in current low-code development platforms, we used two different low-code platforms---Mendix and OutSystems---to implement two case studies. These case studies reveal the limitations of current platforms for specializing platforms with functionalities close to those of low-code development platforms. To compare these two platforms, we consider a list of features that these platforms must satisfy. The results show that current low-code development platforms cannot fully support these new roles.