Mendix unveils a low-code manifesto

Over a decade ago, Mendix’s founders began building a model-driven development platform capable of bridging the divide between what businesses needed and what software was delivering. From the beginning, they established and have followed a set of principles designed to make software development more relevant to business needs while at the same time easier and faster to build and maintain.

The Low-Code Manifesto follows in the tradition of other technology treatises that have formally set out the defining principles of a philosophy or movement, most notably the similarly eponymous Agile Manifesto, which developers have long-embraced. The Low-Code Manifesto sets out these five core application development pillars, which in turn support the Nine Foundational Principles of Low-Code Application Development:

1. Focus on business impact.
   Create alignment, achieve clarity, succeed quickly.
2. Unleash all the makers from across the enterprise.
   No brain power goes to waste.
3. Do everything with an agile attitude.
   Empower small teams, build for the cloud, deploy swiftly and often.
4. Assemble from existing business capabilities.
   Utilize established assets, don’t default to building from scratch. 
5. Connect everything.
   APIs, integrations, new ways to access data — be open and accessible.

“Our guiding principles, when combined, define a new way of creating software — one that leverages all the talent available on both the business and IT sides,” said Johan den Haan, chief technology officer at Mendix. “These principles foster collaboration from beginning-to-end and harness the ambitions of agile workflows and DevOps to deliver all the power and functionality that software is capable of with unprecedented speed, quality, and efficiency.”