Transition to agile with low-code development
Nikunj Balar
Technology Innovator ? Solutions Expert ? Team Empowerment Specialist ? Strategic IT Partner ? Low-Code & Agile Advocate
Development cycles taking too long to meet ever-changing business needs? Traditional software development approaches often fail to keep up with modern business needs. Projects get delayed and opportunities slip away.
Your team can reduce development time by a lot while maintaining high-quality standards. Agile code practices combined with low-code development provide a powerful solution to this challenge. This approach makes shared iterations faster and creates better teamwork between business and IT teams for more responsive software delivery.
Understanding the Agile-Low-Code Synergy
Customer satisfaction through early and continuous delivery of valuable software forms the foundations of successful agile development. Development teams must welcome these principles to build a responsive and adaptive environment.
Low-code naturally arranges with agile's fundamental values at the time you set up an agile development platform. Organizations that use low-code score 8% higher in organizational agility compared to those that don't. This collaborative effort builds a powerful framework to develop and deploy applications quickly.
Benefits of combining agile and low-code
The combination of agile and low-code approaches offers several key advantages:
This combination creates an efficient development environment where business and IT teams work together naturally. Low-code platforms offer visual development environments that generate clean code automatically, which reduces defect risks and simplifies maintenance.
Preparing Your Organization for Change
A successful shift to an agile development platform needs proper preparation and a systematic look at your organization's current state. You need to check your readiness and build solid foundations for change before jumping into implementation.
Your organization's preparedness depends on three critical attributes: capability, capacity, and maturity. Start by evaluating your current resources, systems, and structure to determine readiness levels.
The best results come when you structure your agile low-code teams to stay nimble and reduce dependencies. Enterprise projects work best with seven people, including a product owner, scrum master, and five developers. Your team should have specialists who can train as low-code developers. This creates "generalized specialists" with overlapping skills.
Your transition plan works best with an incremental approach to change management. The process should start with a low-risk project since a complete transition takes time, especially with legacy systems in place.
Strong product ownership and stakeholder relationships matter while promoting quick decision-making culture. Your roadmap needs to cover both technical implementation and cultural transformation. Changes work better in phases with goals broken down into manageable objectives.
Implementing Agile Low-Code Practices
Low-code development with agile practices needs a well-laid-out yet flexible approach. Your team's productivity can jump by 40-90% with low-code platforms. This makes a solid implementation strategy crucial.
Sprint planning shouldn't exceed two hours for each sprint week.
Teams work better with low-code platforms. Business users and developers can see changes live as they happen. Your workflow should highlight visual methods. This lets team members present business logic and data without technical jargon.
Your QA approach must keep up with low-code's quick development pace. Mix automated and manual testing for best results.
Welcome exploratory testing during development to catch issues early. QA engineers should pair with developers to share testing knowledge. Quick issue detection and fixes work best. Let automated tests handle regression cases while manual testing tackles new features.
Note that new feature bugs differ from existing feature regressions. Add an automated test whenever you spot a regression. This keeps quality high while matching low-code's rapid development cycles.
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Managing Cultural Transformation
Cultural transformation presents one of the biggest hurdles in adopting agile practices. Research shows that cultural clashes and organizational resistance rank among the main barriers to agile adoption.
Data silos affect 89% of IT teams and create barriers that block effective collaboration and agile implementation. Your organization must evolve beyond traditional departmental boundaries to build an integrated work environment. The nature of low-code platforms supports this integration by helping technical and non-technical team members work together immediately.
Your organization's cultural aspects heavily influence the success of agile transformation. Building trust between team members and making work processes transparent are vital steps. Leadership plays a vital role - you just need leaders who understand agility firsthand and can embody agile values. These leaders should act as coaches rather than commanders.
Your move to an agile low-code environment calls for a complete approach to skill development. Low-code development differs from traditional methods. It relies more on visual than textual elements.
Outsystems vs. Traditional Development: https://megamindstechnologies.com/blog/outsystems-vs-traditional-development/
Note that changing organizational culture takes time and patience. Your approach should embrace experimentation through frameworks like Cynefin or the Deming circle to guide the transformation. The success of your agile methods relies heavily on cultural aspects. Teams must actively promote self-organization and trust.
Leadership teams must demonstrate and live agile values to help organizations adopt agile practices gradually. This cultural change becomes even more important in low-code environments where development becomes a shared effort that includes business stakeholders.
Measuring Success and ROI
Measuring how well your agile low-code implementation works needs a systematic way to track development metrics and business outcomes. Your success depends on setting clear measures and tracking progress against defined goals.
The most effective agile transformation focuses on metrics that matter to your business goals. Recent studies show successful agile teams track both traditional performance indicators and specific agile metrics to learn about solution quality and team performance.
Your agile metrics should cover productivity, predictability, quality, and value creation. These measurements should line up with your organization's broader application delivery goals.
Velocity is a vital indicator of your team's performance and helps in sprint planning. Teams that use low-code platforms report development cycle savings up to 24%. Your velocity measurements should focus on:
Business value assessment
The business value of your agile low-code implementation goes beyond traditional ROI calculations. Studies show organizations using low-code platforms achieve a 506% return on investment over three years.
Maximizing ROI with OutSystems:
Your ROI assessment needs both quantitative and qualitative measures. To name just one example, waste management company Suez developed their e-commerce portal using low-code and generated ￡500,000 in additional business within just three months.
The evaluation of business value should focus on metrics that show real results. You can track how your low-code platform affects IT efficiency - organizations report reduced technical debt and decreased both CapEx and OpEx through reusable components and improved collaboration.
Digital transformation measures give explanations about your progress toward strategic goals. These metrics help calculate improvements in areas like application delivery speed, user adoption rates, and overall business agility.
Conclusion
Agile low-code development is the foundation of modern software delivery. This piece teaches you the most important strategies to implement it successfully, from getting your organization ready to measuring business value.
Companies that adopt this approach see major improvements in development speed, team collaboration, and business value delivery. Studies show a potential 506% return on investment over three years. This shows how much this transformation can affect an organization. Start your journey towards agile low-code development today, Contact us to learn how we can help revolutionize your software delivery process.