Exploring Change Impact Analysis in Low-Code Development Platforms

Abstract

Low-Code Development Platforms (LCDPs) are being increasingly used in various domains. These platforms accelerate the development of applications by letting devel- opers build models in a higher abstraction. They also provide deployment and life-cycle management functionality. As these platforms evolve, problems can arise. For exam- ple, when metamodels and models do not conform to each other, the built software will malfunction, and users of the application might not have the desired interactions. Therefore the right decisions need to be taken. Change Impact Analysis (CIA) can be done in order to assist developers of these platforms to support the evolution of the platform. There is not much known about CIA in the context of LCDPs. There- fore we conduct a literature review on the currently available approaches. We found that almost no publications mention CIA in an LCDP context. There are however various papers that present interesting directions for CIA within Model-Driven Engi- neering which could be applied within LCDPs. Some of these techniques can be used for general-purpose modeling languages such as UML, but some are only applicable to domain-specific languages. These approaches generally made use of techniques such as explicit rules and traceability in order to analyze changes. There are also several other techniques that are more suitable for more advanced approaches. Recommendations are given about how an LCDP supplier should build up their CIA for their platform. With this knowledge, several directions are presented which researchers can explore to improve this domain. Some of these gather more grounding of the current approaches, provide users with improved feedback, or make their approach more correct and com- plete. At last, recommendations are given to bring the found approaches closer to the LCDP domain by suggesting case studies with other LCDPs