LOWCOMOTE

Funded by: EU Marie Curie, Innovative Training Network (ITN)

The issue

The demand of organisations for enterprise software systems has long outgrown the supply of qualified software developers. It is projected that within the next decade there will be a 1m developer shortfall in the US alone, and 86 per cent of Microsoft's customers report that they already struggle to hire qualified developers.

At the same time, a growing proportion of the workforce are digital native and, while they may lack a background in programming, they are well-versed computer and web users, and skilled with non-trivial software such as office and mobile applications.

The research

Low-code software engineering aspires to leverage this increasingly computer-savvy workforce to address the shortfall of software developers by enabling the former to directly participate in the ideation, design, development, deployment and operation of commonly-required types of enterprise software systems.

While direct participation of non-programmers in software development has been a long-standing vision, the advent of cloud computing and the vast improvement in the capabilities of web browsers in recent years, have made it possible to design, develop and globally deploy software systems directly from the browser by using graphical interfaces that are usable by non-programmers.

Several low-code platforms such as OutSystems, Mendix, Google Appsheets, Microsoft Power Apps, Amazon Honeycode and zAppDev realise this vision and are being increasingly adopted by industry.

The outcome

The ambition of the 48-month LOWCOMOTE Marie Curie Training Network is train 15 future experts in the field of scalable low-code software engineering, across five academic institutions: IMT Atlantique, University of York, Universidad Autόnoma de Madrid, University of L’Aquila and Johannes Kepler Universität Linz and nine industrial organisations: British Telecom, Intecs, Uground, CLMS UK, IncQueryLabs, SparxSystems, Metadev, The Open Group and Amazon Web Services, in Europe.