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API Management Maturity of Low-Code Development Platforms

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Enterprise, Business-Process and Information Systems Modeling (BPMDS 2021, EMMSAD 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 421))

Abstract

Low-code development platforms are environments that enable citizen developers without software engineering knowledge to create software products. These software products range from small business applications to large business platforms, around which software ecosystems increasingly form. In these software ecosystems, different organizations want to extend the created software products with services and software, with the goal of creating active enterprise networks that create value collaboratively. Well designed and maintained application programming interfaces are crucial for these organizations.

In this paper we evaluate the application programming interface management maturity of four low-code development platforms. We show that these platform providers are not yet concerned with helping their customers build software ecosystems around the software platforms that citizen developers create. Furthermore, we identify the software engineering research challenges that these platform providers face. For instance, low-code development platforms should create abstractions that let citizen developers design, develop, and manage application programming interfaces. If low-code development platform providers follow our advice and act on it, they will become able to provide customers with complete ecosystem-enabled platforms instead of providing only simple throwaway business applications.

This research was supported by the NWO AMUSE project (628.006.001): a collaboration between Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Utrecht University, and AFAS Software in the Netherlands. See amuse-project.org for more information.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    A detailed description and the source data are published [11]. The model is also available on the https://MaturityModels.org web site.

  2. 2.

    The detailed evaluations are available through http://dx.doi.org/10.17632/wdtg5ytdpf.1.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. AFAS Software, Inspiratielaan 1, Leusden, The Netherlands

    Michiel Overeem

  2. Utrecht University, Princetonplein 5, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Slinger Jansen & Max Mathijssen

  3. School of Engineering Science, LUT University, Lappeenranta, Finland

    Slinger Jansen

Authors
  1. Michiel Overeem
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  2. Slinger Jansen
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  3. Max Mathijssen
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Michiel Overeem .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia

    Adriano Augusto

  2. University of Technology Sydney, Ultimo, NSW, Australia

    Asif Gill

  3. University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris, France

    Selmin Nurcan

  4. University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel

    Iris Reinhartz-Berger

  5. Munich University of Applied Sciences, Munich, Germany

    Rainer Schmidt

  6. Stockholm University, Kista, Sweden

    Jelena Zdravkovic

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Overeem, M., Jansen, S., Mathijssen, M. (2021). API Management Maturity of Low-Code Development Platforms. In: Augusto, A., Gill, A., Nurcan, S., Reinhartz-Berger, I., Schmidt, R., Zdravkovic, J. (eds) Enterprise, Business-Process and Information Systems Modeling. BPMDS EMMSAD 2021 2021. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 421. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79186-5_25

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79186-5_25

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-79185-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-79186-5

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