Ademar Aguiar

Abstract
Domain-specific standards and documents heavily regulate safety-critical systems. One example is the DO-178C standard for aerospace, which guides organizations to achieve system safety and evidence for their certification. Under such regulated contexts, most organizations use traditional development processes, in contrast to the massive adoption of Agile in the software industry. Among other benefits, Agile methods promise faster delivery and better flexibility to address customer needs. Adopting Agile methods and practices are possible in aerospace because the DO-178C standard does not prescribe concrete software development methods. In spite of that, Agile development is not used in DO-178C contexts. To help change that, our research aims to understand whether and how organizations engineering safety-critical software systems for aerospace may benefit from Agile methods and practices. We analyzed the DO-178C standard and confirm that it is compatible with Agile methods. Then, we present a systematic literature mapping of adopting Agile in software development for aerospace, where we identified significant concerns, recurrent issues, and several challenges. Some real industry aerospace projects provided us with important data and the perspective of domain experts about the pros and cons of Agile methods in this context. We conclude by proposing an agenda of research opportunities to improve safety-critical software development towards agility that we consider worthy of further research, application and confirmation in wider contexts.

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Context: Low-code development is a concept whose presence has grown both in academia and the software industry and is discussed alongside others, such as model-driven engineering and domain-specific languages. Usability is an important concept in low-code contexts since users of these tools often lack a background in programming. Grey literature articles have also stated that low-code tools have high usability.Objective: This paper examines the current literature about low-code and no-code to discover more about them and their relationship with usability, particularly its quality, which factors are the most relevant, and how users view these tools. This focus on usability aims to provide a different point of view from other works on low-code.Method: We performed a systematic literature review based on a formal protocol for this study. The search protocol returned a total of 207 peer-review articles across five databases, which was supplemented with a snowballing process. These were filtered using inclusion and exclusion criteria, resulting in 38 relevant articles that were analysed, synthesised and reported.Conclusion: Despite growing interest and a strong enterprise presence in academia, we did not find a formal definition of low-code, although common characteristics have been specified. We found that users have a heightened awareness of usability regarding low-code tools, with some authors performing feasibility studies on their implementations or listing factors that influence the user experience in a given tool. Researchers are considering usability factors unconsciously, and the low-code field would grow if research on usability increased. This paper also suggests a definition for low-code development.

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