The era of Low-Code & No-Code

I'll start things by coming clean: we're seeing the emergence of a 'stack' approach to low code - from developer tools to simplify workflow builders.?

Yet, Gartner's 2021 predicted low-code to be the only emerging technology product with an immediate and very high impact on enterprises. By 2025, 70% of new applications will be developed by enterprises using no-code technologies.

For a better understanding of the functionality of this technology and what roles software developers fill in, we'll go back to the basics and the history of this emergent technology to be developed:?

The first generation of low-code tools was built for professional developers to quickly ease their job by providing them with the capability to improve application development efficiency incrementally. And once developers had learned how to use them, they were largely successful.?

They had governance and control required for enterprise-grade applications built-in, covering development, testing, production, licensing, and data.?

It's been used in long-standing development methodologies, which means developers were able to use them to build different types of applications.?

From a business perspective, first-generation low-code wasn't intuitive for the line of business stakeholders.

Their involvement in the product development process was limited to providing requirements through the traditional back-and-forth translation process.?

The second-generation low-code brought to the table ‘the citizen developer.’ To sum it up: an entire revolution. People are becoming more tech-savvy, and businesses don’t want to rely upon and wait for software dev teams. So, they wanted to liberate their own ability to automate operational elements of their specific functions for immediate business value.

Second-generation tools were able to create low to mid-complexity applications for between 12-24 users to fulfill a specific purpose. The challenges? Enterprise and IT personnel were tasked with ensuring governance over a variety of areas surrounding application deployment and business utility.?

The first two generations of low code live together to match very different objectives.?

Generation one is an iteration of coding with built-in accelerators, governance, and publishing frameworks.?

Generation two is a step-change, allowing the business to automate many simple applications quickly for tactical, operating advantage, and productivity.?

The third generation removes the business and IT fiefdoms, bringing the business and technical organizations together to co-exist and reach a quick time to value.

As companies face constantly changing needs, they need to create digital apps quickly in order to evolve at a pace, with lower costs and more agile ways of doing this.?