Preface to 1st International Workshop on Modeling in Low-Code Development Platforms (LowCode 2020)

The growing need for secure, trustworthy, and cost-efficient software as well as recent developments in cloud computing technologies, and the shortage of highly skilled professional software developers, have given rise to a new generation of so-called low-code software development platforms, such as Google AppSheet and Microsoft PowerApps. Low-code platforms enable the development and deployment of fully functional applications using mainly visual abstractions and interfaces and requiring little or no procedural code. This makes them accessible to an increasingly digital-native and tech-savvy workforce who can directly and effectively contribute to the software development process, even if they lack a programming background. At the heart of low-code applications are typically models of the structure, the behavior, and the presentation of the application. Such application models need to be edited (using graphical and textual interfaces), validated, version-controlled, and eventually transformed or interpreted to deliver applications for end-users. As all of these activities have been of core interest to the MoDELS community over the last two decades, the LowCode workshop has been established at MoDELS as an opportunity to connect low-code platform vendors with model-driven engineering technology providers as well as to stimulate research on low-code platforms using model-driven engineering concepts and techniques.