Collaboration Between Developers and Designers

• Autor(a) principal: Pacheco, João Rafael Mira de Carvalho
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/135422
• topic: Design To Code; OutSystems; Low-Code Platforms; Front-end Development; Automation; Generation; Domínio/Área Científica::Engenharia e Tecnologia::Engenharia Eletrotécnica, Eletrónica e Informática

Customer-facing applications are essential for businesses. Therefore, a good user experience is fundamental for their success in the market. Companies nowadays employ highly specialized people in front-end development and User Experience (UX) & User Interface (UI) design to achieve this goal. Their collaboration is critical, and raises some efficiency challenges in the software industry. This work focuses and is applied on OutSystems, a low-code platform that inherits these challenges. While there are some code-generation plugins for popular design tools, these do not generate code for low-code platforms. Therefore, the transformation process from design to development is done 100% manually, which is highly inefficient. Our goal is to accelerate this transformation process from a design model to a development model to mitigate this inefficiency. To do so, we developed an approach using model transformation techniques that automates part of the process. Namely, it automates the generation of application pages/screens by composing the screen mockups in a design technology (such as Figma or Sketch) with a library of reusable UI components to instantiate the design in a front-end technology (such as OutSystems). Our approach was validated by a professional team of front-end developers from an established enterprise-grade low-code platform who applied and evaluated this work on some of their past real projects. Preliminary results show an overall acceptance of the developed tool with a possible increase of 150% to 400% in the value that they can deliver without investing more effort than they already do today. This mitigates a bottleneck faced by development teams today. To increase the value, they could offer to customers (e.g., by producing more application screens in the same period), they would need to recruit new collaborators whose skill set is high on demand. This work delivers major efficiency improvements and lessens the severe lack of qualified professionals, by allowing existing ones to produce more without investing further effort.