The Use of Low-Code During a Skill Shortage

With rising requirements for digitalization, corporations must increase the speed in which their production and products are digitized. Because of that, there is an increasing demand of software developers which has led to a high skill shortage in Germany. Combined with rising expectations for speed and costs to develop a platform, this led to a problem, that needs to be solved. The goal of this paper is to estimate the benefit of using Low-Code platforms instead of traditional programming languages. Therefore, the elaboration deals with the central research question whether a Low-Code platform can support corporations through the skill shortage and at the same time reduce time and costs that it takes to develop an application. To answer this question, a Value Benefit Analysis was used to specify which platform provides the highest benefit for a use-case in the production of Vitesco Technologies in Dortmund. Thereupon, an example application was built to determine the usability. As final result, it can be concluded that the usage of Low-Code platforms in average leads to less time and costs that is needed for the development. In addition, these platforms are easy to use even without prior knowledge which leads to an advantage that can be used during a skill shortage. On the other hand, it also results in less flexibility which makes it harder to program complex functionalities. This demonstrates that a Low-Code platform can provide a great benefit when used for simple applications, whereas it is not useful for the use of more complex applications.