Low-Code/No-Code: A Transformative High-Stake Gambit
The low-code/no-code (LCNC) development trend is empowering a new breed of "citizen developers" - business technologists who create applications with little to no software coding experience. This shift is driving innovation, but also raising concerns about governance and the role of professional developers.
Lack of programming experience and theoretical knowledge, is presumably compensated by citizen developers with a plethora of sophisticated Rapid Application Development (RAD) environments that use visual drag-and-drop interfaces as an abstraction layer for building data-driven applications with modern GUIs from scratch.
On the positive side, this allows faster development cycles and reduces the need for extensive coding knowledge.
According to Gartner [2], citizen developers will be responsible for 80% of the user base by 2026, a significant increase compared to the previous 5 years. The total revenue forecast of US$31 billion in 2024 for the LCNC market alone is also quite an impressive indication of strong growth and adoption.
Opportunities for Businesses
Citizen-developers can indeed accelerate digital transformation by building custom applications and leveraging in-house expertise to address day-to-day challenges.
By utilizing those intuitive visual platforms, they can now streamline operations, automate workflows, and drive productivity gains by building upon their understanding of the business challenges and inefficiencies within their main roles.
LCNC platforms give them a missing ability to translate ideas into real software and this trend shows that organizations all over the world cannot and will not ignore it, especially if they currently suffering from cumbersome traditional software development cycles.
In certain scenarios, citizen developers may even alleviate the burden on IT teams, freeing them to prioritize other initiatives in R&D of edge technology or much more complex long-term business value projects, instead of handling less demanding requests and limited-scope optimizations.
Some organizations may also find the advent of citizen developers convenient as a cost-effective path to digital transformation assuming it comes with lower expenditures in terms of learning curve and licenses for using proprietary LNCN platforms.
In my opinion, their impact is amplified when integrated into a broader business strategy that connects them with other technology enablers like AI, business intelligence, and robot process automation (RPA).
Seasoned Programmers at Risk?
However, the rise of citizen development is provoking debate around the role of professional developers, seasoned experts and software engineers. Some argue low-code/no-code paths threaten to make traditional programming obsolete.
Experienced software developers may legitimately push LCNC back based on concerns around compliance, security, and scalability with apps built by non-experts.
I think we should look at this carefully because there are no guarantees citizen-development approach will assert the importance of best practices, efficient data structures and algorithms, well-thought design patterns, and long-term maintainability.
The focus on citizen developers is about accelerating disruption to gain a competitive edge in an ever-evolving business landscape. But when it comes to navigating the intricate compliance regulations and security, LCNC endeavours may end-up missing important requirements.
Data privacy, export controls, access controls, and secure coding practices are among those requirements capable of exposing organizations to significant risks, such as data breaches, regulatory fines, and credibility loss.
Professional developers undergo rigorous training in software engineering principles and techniques to acquire technology acumen and awareness of industry standards to cope with such risks, to say the least, while citizen developers mostly rely on what the RAD environment has to offer them, which is a concern in itself due to each vendor growth ambitions and their road map for future improvements.
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J. C. Kirchhof, N. Jansen, B. Rumpe, and A. Wortmann (2023) provided a comparison of 16 key characteristics between 18 low code tools (some of them are widely known LCNC platforms), that are technically important to consider and could be a factor of strategic relevance.
In addition, integrating solutions with legacy systems and enterprise applications operating with non-standard APIs or vendor-dependent APIs, add a new mix to a well-known and ever-challenging topic. If system integration is superficially addressed the result is a poorly designed and sub-optimal solution under-the-hood at best, not to mention the impact of collateral effects in case of mission-critical applications.
A recent KPMG survey provided that 50% of companies in average use LCNC platforms for developing smaller or less complex applications. How well positioned are these companies if this trend changes upside down sooner?
The fact citizen developers can rapidly create applications to address immediate needs, does not mean these solutions will support user base growth or increased demand for data processing capabilities. Consequently, performance bottlenecks could lead to the accumulation of technical debt.
In addition, shorten time-to-market does not necessarily translate into properly documented business cases, technical specifications, or support knowledge base. If the citizen-developer leaves the organization or transitions to a different role, the application may become a liability due to a lack of knowledge transfer and proper maintenance procedures. Of course, this is not an isolated problem nor an exclusive issue, but it can be potentiated as the pool of citizen developers grows faster and unattended.
Conclusion
While many analysts acknowledge the potential of citizen development, I think it is important to consider having in place a robust governance framework to ensure the quality and security of the developed applications. In this regard, professional developers can play a pivotal role by providing oversight, guidelines, and authoritative assessments to mitigate risks arising from citizen-developed applications as they are established as mainstream.
To achieve this, organizations could consider implementing strict validation processes to assess eligibility and architectural compliance supported by permanent mentorship.
Ultimately, citizen development should not be viewed as a replacement for traditional software development roles but rather as a complementary approach that can enhance digital transformation efforts. Organizations can harness the benefits of both approaches to drive innovation and stay competitive by going beyond the market hype.
References:
[3] J. C. Kirchhof, N. Jansen, B. Rumpe and A. Wortmann, "Navigating the Low-Code Landscape: A Comparison of Development Platforms," 2023 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems Companion (MODELS-C), V?ster?s, Sweden, 2023, pp. 854-862, doi: 10.1109/MODELS-C59198.2023.00135.
[4] https://kpmg.com/pt/pt/home/insights/2024/02/plataformas-low-code-moldam-transformacao-digital.html
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8 个月I honestly don't think that a non professional approach to any particular task jeopardizes the dev. role on its own. As you've mentioned an organization can't honestly consider incorporating any code done this way as it's a potential liability that can be easily exploited. Applications and software in general needs a professional approach during and after implantation and these days anything that can potentially impact or change a org. productive environment needs a very thoughtful impact analysis and tests.