What's Wrong With Low-Code Development Platforms? An Empirical Study of Low-Code Development Platform Bugs

Low-code development platforms (LCDPs) are increasingly being introduced and leveraged by major IT enterprises to lower the threshold and promote the efficiency of software development. Like other software systems, LCDPs are also inevitable to have bugs. The bugs in LCDPs may cause unpredictable consequences as they pose risks to all the downstream software products. However, to the best of our knowledge, there exist no studies that ever consider the bugs caused by LCDPs. To handle the LCDP bugs better, in this article, we conduct an empirical study of the characteristics of LCDP bugs by examining 974 confirmed bugs of four dominant LCDPs (i.e., OutSystems, Mendix, Appsmith, and Budibase) from both commercial and open-source domains. These bugs are analyzed from three perspectives, including bug root causes, bug symptoms, and the affected stages of LCDPs. Based on the analysis, we obtain a series of valuable findings. For example, around 60% of the bugs reside in the stage of designing and specifying the developed applications. Over 37% of the bugs lead LCDPs to behave unexpectedly but without showing explicit signs. Moreover, the bugs relevant to the incorrect graphics of user interfaces are significant due to the characteristics of LCDPs. These findings point out the guidelines, challenges, and future directions to address LCDP bugs.