Towards the No-Code Era: A Vision and Plan for the Future of Software Development

This paper provides a highly opinionated and biased vision and a two-stage plan with guidelines to reach a new era of software development, where anyone can create software without bothering to write code. Moreover, this paper explores in depth the first of these stages, which consists of creating a no-code tool based on six principles: configuration driven development, APIs, open-source, cross-platform, cloud computing, and design systems. An examination of each principle is presented and a case is made for why such a combination of principles would lay the foundation for future development efforts. Possible enquiries are addressed and a path is laid out for future works.