Understanding the socio-technical aspects of low-code adoption for software development

The digital transformation of organizations’ leverages several approaches for creating software applications that meet the requirements of the specific context. Besides well-researched approaches like software development, outsourcing, or customizing commercial software packages, low-code platforms today offer a new approach for creating software. The low-code approach allows to develop software without or with limited actual coding, but by combining executable software components into workflows. While the low-code approach simplifies software development and offers a reduction in effort and time, we lack explanations on why organizations adopt it, and which challenges are associated with this adoption. We, therefore, investigate the adoption of the low-code approach based on the technology-organization-environment framework. We identified ten aspects supporting and six aspects hindering the adoption of the low-code approach. For practice, we propose a model that can assist organizations in determining the adequacy for adopting the low-code approach.