There have been some industry trends over the past few decades aimed at reducing the amount of manual coding required to make software, such as 4GL and CASE tools in the 80s of the 20th century, rapid application development in the 90s of the 20th century, end-user development in the early 21st century, and MDEs in the last 20 years. The term "low**" first appeared in a 2014 report by market analyst firm Forrester, which defined a low** development platform (LCDP) as "a platform for the rapid delivery of business applications with minimal hand-coding and minimal upfront investment, including setup, training, and deployment." Interestingly, the report identifies the LCDP domain as dedicated to producing business applications such as enterprise resource planning software, customer relationship management, business process management, and other productivity-enhancing applications. In 2016, Forrester detailed the successful use cases of LCDP in four specific use cases: database, request processing, process, and mobile-first.
That definition changed, and in 2017, Forrester provided a more detailed version that described LCDP as "a product and/or cloud service for application development that employs visual, declarative technology rather than programming technology, at low or zero cost to the customer, and can begin in money and training time, rising proportionally with the business value of the platform." The focus here is on visual interfaces and declarative techniques, with Forrester placing a strong emphasis on visual WYSIWYG development and model-driven development. For the key differentiating aspects of these solutions, the focus is on the platform: LCDP is first and foremost a platform, with application deployment and lifecycle management capabilities, as well as platform management.
Gartner identified a similar area in 2016 called Low Application Platforms (LCAPs). In particular, they introduced enterprise LCAP to produce enterprise-grade applications that require high performance, scalability, high availability, disaster recovery, security, service-level agreements, resource usage tracking, technical support from vendors, and API access to on-premises and cloud services.
2017 marked the beginning of a series of acquisitions by LCDP**. Appleian went public in May 2017 and had a market capitalization of almost $2 billion in 2018. In July 2018, OutSystems received 3$600 million investment. In August 2018, Siemens announced that it would launch a 7$300 million acquisition of Mendix. In 2017, Forrester estimated the global market size for LCDP at $3.8 billion.