In this thesis we study two aspects of the lattice formulation of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). We first describe the study of baryons with one heavy and two light quarks. We compute the full spectrum for the ground state of the channels with quantum numbers J^P = ¹/₂ ⁺, ³/₂⁺, isospin I = 0,1 and strangeness S = 0, -1, -2. For the channel with quantum numbers J^p = ¹/₂⁺ we discuss the form factors for semileptonic decays of heavy baryons, compute the Isgur-Wise function and study its dependence on the light quark mass. In the second part of this thesis, we report the numerical results of a first study of a one-parameter family of covariant, non-perturbative gauge-fixing conditions. The gauge dependence of the gluon propagator is discussed.