How truly achieve agility on your organization focusing on what matters to your business and multiply the productivity of your development team
Fashion is cyclical and the same thing happens in Software Engineering. We live in a world where each innovation seems similar to one in the past; we advanced some time ago. That’s because what we’re doing is just refining over and over solutions for the same problems.
We’ve lived for the last years a “developer is the new black” rise, where anything related to writing code is excellent. Even devs are now observed as a cool character like the ones from Silicon Valley (the HBO show) instead of the one you can make fun of like in The I.T Crowd.
But, now, it seems we’re going back to a new rise of what is called Low-Code (or No Code) Applications.
Low-Code Application is a piece of software that helps you generate your applications or services without needing to write code in any programming language, instead of doing that, you can drag & drop some boxes that represent what you’d like to do instead of write it yourself.
That has provided advantages that are now again on the table. Let’s take a look at those advantages in more detail
1.- Provides more agility
That’s clear. No matter how high level your programming language is, no matter how many archetypes you have to generate your project skeleton or the framework and libraries that you use. Typing is always slower than drag some boxes into the white canvas and connects them with some links.
And I’m a person that is a terminal guy and VI power-user, and I realize the power of the keyboard, But let’s be honest and ask you one question:
How many of the keywords you type in your code are providing value to the business and how many are just needed for technical reasons?
Not only things like exception handling, auditing, logging, service discovery, configuration management, but stuff like loop structure, function signature definition, variable definition, class definition, and so on…
You can truly focus on the business value that you’re trying to provide to your business instead of spending time around how to manage any technical capabilities.
2.- Easier to maintain
One month after production only the developer and god knows what the code does. After a year, just god knows…
Coding is awesome but it is at the same time complex to maintain. Mainly on enterprises when developers are shifting from one project to the other, from some departments to others, and new people are being onboarded all the time to maintain and evolve some codes.
And the ones that have been in the industry for some time, know for example the situation when people said: “I prefer not to touch that because we don’t know what’s doing”, “We cannot migrate this Mainframe application because we don’t know it will be able to capture all the functionality they’re providing.”
And that’s bad for several reasons. First of all, it is costly to maintain, more complex to do it, but second is also avoiding you to evolve at the pace that you want to do it.
3.- Safer and Cost-Effective
Don’t get me wrong about this: Programming can be as safer as any low-code application. That’s clear because, in the end, any low-code app ends up generating the same binary or bytecode to be executed.
The problem is that this is going to depend on the skills of the programmer. We live in a situation that, even programming and developers are a cool thing, as you need a big number of devs in your team that implies that not all of them are as experienced and skill as you want them to be.
Reality is much more complex and also you need to deal with your budget reality and find the way to get the best of your team.
Using Low-code application, you are guaranteed the quality of the base components that are verified by a company and that they’ve improved with dedicated teams incorporating feedback for customers all over the world, which makes it safer.
4.- As ready as a code-base solution for specific needs
One of the myths that are saying against Low Code is that it is suitable for generic workloads and use-cases, but it is not capable of being adapted and optimized for your needs.
Regarding this usual push-back, first of all, we need to work on the misconception of the level of specification our software needs. In the end, the times when you need to do something so specific that is not covered by the options available out of the box are so low that it is complex to justify. Are you going to make a slower 99% of your development only to be able to do it quicker than 1%? How much of your workloads are not similar to what other companies are doing in the same industry?
But even for the sake of the discussion, let’s assume that’s true, and you need a single piece of logic a low-code application doesn’t provide out of the box. Ok, Low-Code means that you don’t need to write code, not that you cannot do it.
Most of the platforms support the option to add code if needed as an option to cover these cases. So, even in those cases, you still have the same tools to make it specific without losing all the advantages of your daily activities.
Summary
Low-code applications are one of the solutions you have at your disposal to improve your agility and your productivity in your developments to meet the pace of the changes in your business.
The solutions working on that space are not new, but they’ve been renovated to adapt to the modern developer paradigms (microservices, container-based, API-led, event-driven…) so you’re not going to miss anything but to get more time to provide even more value to your business.
