The second annual International Workshop on Low-Code Development and Software Architecture (LArc) took place at ICSE 2026 in Rio De Janeiro.
The workshop positions LC/NC development as a response to the global shortage of professional software developers and investigates how abstract visual modelling approaches can allow domain experts to participate directly in software creation.
Pictured above are Prof. Michel Chaudron (Eindhoven University of Technology) and Prof. Tiziana Margaria (University of Limerick) who co-chaired the workshop this year.
About LArc:
The emerging paradigm of Low-Code (LC)/No-Code (NC) software development is a promising avenue to counter the currently dire shortage of skilled software developers. LC/NC approaches hinge on some kind of models and some kind of direct ”checkability“ of those models in order to ensure properties of the resulting artefacts. Because they use models, it is in principle possible to formalize the “language” of various flavours of LC and NC. Because these languages are abstract, very often graphical, and tend to be domain-specific, they resonate well with domain experts who are not able to code and do not intend to become skilled in programming in order to do their (non-programmer) jobs. A number of researchers and practitioners say that LC/NC is not new, as many communities of research and practice have pushed in this direction for over five decades. However, none of them has succeeded. The LC/NC wave we are observing today seems to be steered by new actors coming from the practice, and in many respects reinventing wheels detached from the ”culture“ and the advances in each of the above domains.
Specifically of interest here is the relationship between LC/NC approaches and software architectures. This relationship, however, comes with many questions. If architectures are more “under the hood”, to which extent do they still matter? And to whom do they matter? Will LC/NC development tools impose architectural choices or paradigms? To which extent is the quest for modularization and reusability inherent to the concept of components in component-based development, objects in object-oriented programming, services and microservices, in connection with the LC/NC paradigm?
This workshop intends to gather researchers and practitioners interested in:
- discussing the relationship between LC/NC and software architectures;
- exploring how software architecture issues are currently handled by low-code platforms;
- identifying the impact of low-code development to long-term software architecture;
- discussing the challenges of implementing software architecture tactics and design patterns in low-code development;
- discussing the impact of low-code development on quality attributes; and
- brainstorming new ideas around low-code development.
