Low-Code / No-Code Development

From the last twenty years or so, the organizations have bought complex and expensive applications like SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, Dynamics 365 etc. to solve their big business problems. These applications have driven everything from sales all the way to accounting. However organizations are often forced to fit in to the vendors box of described processes to adopt these applications as-it-is. The alternative of this problem is an expensive customization effort with a lot of time. Like a custom suit or dress, offers a close fit to business requirements. But as with custom tailoring of clothing, it typically means higher costs and a long wait. So most of the companies just try to conform to the application’s vendor defined processes. But what often happens is, whoever is that organizations, it would just end up with a ton of gaps, and those gaps are filled & driven through endless spreadsheets.

Now the spreadsheets are a lousy way of running an organization. They don't scale, they can have more maintenance cost,?they rely too much on individual manage them so they're inconsistent to use as overall. But at the same time, the spreadsheets are flexible and easy to understand and this is why companies have them all over the place. So companies are left with two options either their complex excel processes OR the vendor’s complex software applications as-it-is. And this is the gap, which the Low-Code / No-Code development fills. The Low-Code / No-Code is a flexible and easy to understand design space that business people can grasp which can be translated into a scalable application which developers can integrate with and scale.?

Revolution

What it means for enterprise application development, companies can see a big fundamental shift, a big change of how enterprise application development is happening and it covers the full process of what it means to go from ideation, to design, to implementation, to deployment into servicing.

Every aspect is fundamentally being updated and changed because of many broad changes in the industry. This big change is due to four big waves that are altogether updating and modifying how people think about application development. Some of these waves are long running changes that have been secular trends for years, and some are much more sudden & much more immediate. All four waves are build on top of one another, and as together, they are changing everything when it comes to enterprise application development.

1. Changing Workforce

First of these 4 waves is the changing workforce. we can see that 35 percent of the workforce are now millennials and 75 percent of the workforce will be millennials in next couple of years, and additionally 24 percent of the workforce are Generation Z. What this means is that expectations for digital experiences for web & mobile applications are incredibly high. People are used to using applications that are cloud connected, AI enabled, and mobile first as part of their day-to-day life on their phone. Companies need to make sure that this workforce has their demands and expectations met. This digital native workforce will not be satisfied by the hundred clicks on 100 text boxes on 100 screen applications. They want something more, and they want it Now!

2. Surging Digital Demands

This can be seen combined with the previous digital transformation initiatives to be driving huge demand for digital experiences. There is a projection of millions of apps to be built in next 5 years, which looks to be huge number as compared to past decades. The demand for mobile apps is growing five times faster than a typical IT department can deliver and satisfy. On top of that, all these new applications, digital experiences, are generating an unbelievable amount of data. A large portion of that data is unstructured, and according to a survey, over 85 percent of companies are struggling to analyze this unstructured data.

3. Not enough Developers

This together is just creating an in-balance & bringing an unparalleled number and request for application experiences when we put that in context of millions of the apps. This means the tools companies have been using in last decades for analyzing data would not work for next 5 years. It would create a tremendous & fast growing demand of professional developers and coders which will create a developer shortfall. It's projected that there will be a million developer shortfall in the United States only over the coming decade. This is a serious problem for companies of all industries. More developer positions were hired outside of technology (in industries like energy, retail, health care, financial services etc.) than hired in core technology even.

4. Economic Turndown

If we think about that there is a changing workforce, growing need for digital experiences but there aren't enough developers, these three things compound together to dramatically change to address enterprise applications development and would come up with the sudden and dramatic economic impact with Covid-19. As per the world bank, GDP could decline across the world in all industries and percentage in United States would even be higher, and definitely there would be an immense pressure on the enterprises. It also has a big impact on digital transformation for customers, as the big digital experiences planned for them might not be viable anymore. So there has to be a snack size, bite size incremental process that delivers high results with great ROI. The all above problems route to the Low-Code / No-Code development.

What is Low-Code / No-Code Development ?

In Software development, the Low-Code / No-Code means what they really sounds like. In a lot of ways, Low-Code and No-Code development are very similar. They provide a visual development approach to rapid application development. Both promise to help professional and non-professional developers alike create applications with greater efficiency, and hence increasing their productivity. Both of these strip away the overhead of standing up environments and maintaining infrastructure by offering in a platform-as-a-service / PaaS form factor. This greatly expands the population of people who can build software applications within the business. You don't have to be a developer, you don't have to be a coder and you can still use your skills and application experiences you have already as a standard information to get the job done.

With this modular approach, professional developers can quickly build applications without writing code line by line. Hence it would be freeing them for larger or more complex projects. People can create apps with no knowledge of programming languages, machine code, or platform development work. Low-Code and No-Code platforms encapsulate all of this development, deployment, testing etc. work behind a user friendly graphical user interface. Users can drag and drop reusable components, which are just visual representations of code and link them together to create the desired functional workflow. Gone are the days of lengthy requirements documents or specification documents but instead you can now actually bring together all parts of the company to work on a single solution together and this produces far better outcomes. Broad use of these Low-Code / No-Code tools institutionalizes the “Shadow IT” phenomenon in the IT organizations.

Low-Code vs No-Code ?

The target of Low-Code & No-Code development is to make app development accessible to greater number of people to overcome the workforce challenge. The difference between Low-Code and No-Code comes down to the reason behind their naming. Low-Code requires users to do "some level" of coding, and these tools are mostly being used by professional developers and programmers or hybrid Business/IT people to improve the performance as a whole. The Low-Code is Used to create apps that run critical business processes or for apps in portals that likely require integration with other systems and data sources. No-code usually targets the non technical user (also called as “Citizen Developers”) and is truly a drag and drop process, and it is used to create tactical apps to handle simple functions, and typically only front end apps i.e. form based data input, simple reporting & dashboards, light weight back office automation.

Low-Code platforms follows the application development from a standard software engineering perspective, and take advantage of scalable application architecture and flexible deployment options. Low-Code is capable of handling more use cases. The Low-Code platforms address innovative with next-generation technologies; like artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain etc. They also have the ability to create customer experience applications for mobile, because they include the user interface frameworks too. Since No-code platforms enable less technical business users so they are fast enough for development comparetively. So you would not be overhauling a legacy systems here due to its simplicity through No-Code.

Low-Code Vendors

Some of the Low-Code vendors in the market are listed below.

The big focus of Microsoft is to go lean into this transformation and to respond to these four fundamental shifts that are driving the need for Low-Code, with the Microsoft Power Platform. There's four major components in Microsoft Power Platform.

1. Power BI: A Low-Code way to do business analytics on business intelligence to understand the data you're generating to create Reports and Dashboards.

2. Power Apps: A Low-Code way to go build web and mobile applications, so if you can use Microsoft PowerPoint or Microsoft Excel, you can now build a mobile app with Power Apps.

3. Power Automate: A Low-Code way to use robotic process automation as well as API based automation to automate all parts of your business process and workflow to improve efficiency of your existing workforce.

4. Power Virtual Agent: A Low-Code way to go build chat bots which is AI focused and AI driven because customers and users expect a conversational experience.

?No-Code Vendors

Some of the No-Code vendors in the market are listed below.

Challenges

• There is an increased risk of monolithic application architecture due to development team inexperience with application architecture patterns.
• IT organizations need to maintain some control over system development, including the selection of which Low-Codde /No-Code tools the organization will support.
• If not governed properly. the "Citizen Developers" tend to create applications that don’t scale well, and then they try to turn them over to IT, or the person may leave the company, and no one knows how to change or support the system they developed.
• Companies need to make sure the accuracy of the business requirements met while fast developing using with Low-Code / No-Code. Most No-Code platforms require deployment to their public cloud and do not give the flexibility to deploy to private cloud or on-premises infrastructure.

Having said that, the Low-Code / No-Code development trends wouldn't be targetting to replace the traditional software development practices altogather for specially for large scale custom software solution for clients.