There is currently a high demand for professionals with digital skills in the areas of Informatio... more There is currently a high demand for professionals with digital skills in the areas of Information and Communication Technologies. As such, in future this trend is expected to increase. Higher education institutions are unable to train adequate numbers of qualified people to respond to employers' requests. In other areas, it is expected that increasing computerization and automation will have a significant impact on reducing certain types of jobs, which highlights the need and importance for many workers to develop new digital skills in order to be better prepared to face future challenges. It also seems clear that many of the needs may be met by people who, while not having a higher education in ICT fields, such as that taught in higher education institutions, these can be suppressed by people with specific training which is more focused on a particular technology or focused on certain development niches. In this context, low-code development platforms can play an important role in training or retraining people from areas with lower market demand for ICT areas. Their characteristics and potential make them suitable for technicians with higher qualifications in other areas, and other professionals, to acquire new skills through retraining or supplementing / recycling pre-acquired basic knowledge that may become productive labour in the IT world. In this paper we describe a strategy, and several case studies, where a low-code development platform is used to reskill STEM professionals and/or professionals who, having basic IT knowledge are in precarious activities, to perform ICT professional activity. This strategy not only contributes to the needs of IT professionals but also enables many professionals to make timely retraining into areas of greater competitiveness, greater job stability and better working conditions. Throughout the paper, we present case studies that are part of this strategy and that have had positive results. These case studies include Enterprise-Higher Education collaborative training, reskilling for unemployed people with higher education in other areas, and training for those who are active, working in areas where labour needs are likely to decrease in the mid-term. The paper also identifies the benefits and contributions resulting from the use of the OutSystems low-code platform to implement this strategy.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
Low-code development platforms are designed to accelerate software development with a minimum of ... more Low-code development platforms are designed to accelerate software development with a minimum of hand coding. They have allowed professionals with distinct backgrounds to become software developers. This brings more professionals to IT areas, reskilling some of them from different areas of knowledge but, at the same time, it has also brought to the software development area many professionals without a strong background in this area. Although testing should be performed in all applications, regardless of the programming language or the platform used, this reinforces the need for testing low-code developed applications. In this work, we study the test automation process on the OutSystems low-code development platform. The focus is on Unit, Integration/API and System/End-to-End testing levels. Examples illustrate that the implementation of best practices during the development process can have a significant influence on the test automation process. However, it is important to know whether the workload associated with the implementation of the best practices can undermine the benefits of using a low-code platform and it is important to consider that not all test automation tools have the same behavior.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
There is currently a high demand for professionals with digital skills in the areas of Informatio... more There is currently a high demand for professionals with digital skills in the areas of Information and Communication Technologies. As such, in future this trend is expected to increase. Higher education institutions are unable to train adequate numbers of qualified people to respond to employers' requests. In other areas, it is expected that increasing computerization and automation will have a significant impact on reducing certain types of jobs, which highlights the need and importance for many workers to develop new digital skills in order to be better prepared to face future challenges. It also seems clear that many of the needs may be met by people who, while not having a higher education in ICT fields, such as that taught in higher education institutions, these can be suppressed by people with specific training which is more focused on a particular technology or focused on certain development niches. In this context, low-code development platforms can play an important role in training or retraining people from areas with lower market demand for ICT areas. Their characteristics and potential make them suitable for technicians with higher qualifications in other areas, and other professionals, to acquire new skills through retraining or supplementing / recycling pre-acquired basic knowledge that may become productive labour in the IT world. In this paper we describe a strategy, and several case studies, where a low-code development platform is used to reskill STEM professionals and/or professionals who, having basic IT knowledge are in precarious activities, to perform ICT professional activity. This strategy not only contributes to the needs of IT professionals but also enables many professionals to make timely retraining into areas of greater competitiveness, greater job stability and better working conditions. Throughout the paper, we present case studies that are part of this strategy and that have had positive results. These case studies include Enterprise-Higher Education collaborative training, reskilling for unemployed people with higher education in other areas, and training for those who are active, working in areas where labour needs are likely to decrease in the mid-term. The paper also identifies the benefits and contributions resulting from the use of the OutSystems low-code platform to implement this strategy.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
Low-code development platforms are designed to accelerate software development with a minimum of ... more Low-code development platforms are designed to accelerate software development with a minimum of hand coding. They have allowed professionals with distinct backgrounds to become software developers. This brings more professionals to IT areas, reskilling some of them from different areas of knowledge but, at the same time, it has also brought to the software development area many professionals without a strong background in this area. Although testing should be performed in all applications, regardless of the programming language or the platform used, this reinforces the need for testing low-code developed applications. In this work, we study the test automation process on the OutSystems low-code development platform. The focus is on Unit, Integration/API and System/End-to-End testing levels. Examples illustrate that the implementation of best practices during the development process can have a significant influence on the test automation process. However, it is important to know whether the workload associated with the implementation of the best practices can undermine the benefits of using a low-code platform and it is important to consider that not all test automation tools have the same behavior.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
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Papers by Jose Metrolho