LowCode 2023 : International Workshop on Modeling in Low-Code Development Platforms

Overview
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The growing need for secure, trustworthy, and cost-efficient software as well as recent developments in cloud computing technologies, and the shortage of highly-skilled professional software developers, have given rise to a new generation of low-code software development platforms, such as Google AppSheet and Microsoft PowerApps. Low-code platforms enable the development and deployment of fully-functional applications using mainly visual abstractions and interfaces and requiring little or no procedural code. This makes them accessible to an increasingly digital-native and tech-savvy workforce who can directly and effectively contribute to the software development process, even if they lack a programming background.

At the heart of low-code applications are typically models of the structure, the behaviour and the presentation of the application. Low-code application models need to be edited (using graphical and textual interfaces), validated, version-controlled and eventually transformed or interpreted to deliver user-facing applications.

As all of these activities have been of core interest to the MODELS community over the last two decades, a workshop on low-code software development at MODELS is a natural fit and an opportunity to bring together model-driven and low-code platform vendors, researchers and users, with substantial benefits to be reaped from all sides.

Objectives and Topics
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The objectives of LowCode 2023 are to:
- bring together developers and users of low-code platforms with model-driven engineering researchers and practitioners
- explore the technologies that power contemporary low-code platforms
- identify the open challenges that vendors and users of low-code platforms face
- identify solutions from the model-driven engineering community that could be ported/adapted in the context of low-code development

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Low-code development platforms as a service
- Recommender systems for low-code platforms
- Citizen/end-user software development
- Comparisons of classical MDE tools and low-code platforms
- Technologies underpinning low-code platforms
- Graphical and textual cloud-based editors
- Low-code development for and from mobile devices
- Repositories of low-code development artefacts
- Surveys of low-code platforms
- Empirical studies of using low-code platforms
- Interoperability issues between low-code platforms
- Automation support in low-code platforms
- Scalability in low-code development
- Collaborative low-code development

Publication and submission guidelines
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The papers will be included in the MODELS joint workshop proceedings published by the IEEE. The joint proceedings will include an opening message from the organizers and the workshop program committee. We aim to arrange for extended versions of the best papers to be published in a journal (e.g. SoSyM).

Two kinds of papers are solicited: regular papers (10 pp), and short papers (5 pp), adhering to the IEEE format (available at https://www.ieee.org/conferences/publishing/templates.html).

Contributions should present novel research ideas (even if at a preliminary development stage), challenging problems, and practical contributions to the domain. Industrial experience reports or case studies related to the development or use of low-code development platforms in industrial settings are also solicited. All papers must be written in English.

Paper can be submitted via EasyChair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=lowcode2023

Organizers
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- Dimitris Kolovos, University of York (UK)
- Juan De Lara, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain)
- Massimo Tisi, IMT Atlantique (France)
- Manuel Wimmer, JKU Linz (Austria)