The Who, What and Why of Performance and Reliability Testing of Low Code/No Code Applications

Part 1: The Who and the What

When I was tasked with writing a post about the ins and outs of stress and reliability testing and monitoring of low code/no code platforms it became clear after a couple of days spent researching that this topic could turn into a TL;DR as a single post so we decided to split it up. Part 1 is intended as a (very) high level intro into the world of low code/no code applications which will be henceforth referred to as LC/NC to keep this piece in the spirit of LC/NC and save some bytes.

If your teams have already gone down the LC/NC rabbit hole some time ago and you are already familiar with the concepts and major players in the space then Part 2 (linked HERE) is probably more for you. Otherwise I’ll try to keep this as lightweight as possible, just enough to set the context before diving into the performance, reliability testing and monitoring considerations-particularly as they relate to LC/NC.

Low Code/No Code Platforms, the What and the Who

LC/NC, the latest twist on a decades-old story in IT: “The Disruptive New Technology That Came To Town”. One of my first experiences with this happened longer ago than I care to say. Much web development was still done in command line editors, then commercial GUI HTML editors began to emerge. “Who would want to give up the control and flexibility of building pages in Vi or EMACS?” people would ask. The answer was quite a few people actually. Did that mean the end of the road for the typical CLI unix hack? Not at all. Were graphical editors, IDEs and the like here to stay? You bet. LC/NC seems familiar in these respects. In my opinion, some skill sets will see less demand over time however new skills profiles are emerging as I write this to support the LC/NC phenomenon.

I don’t pretend to be and expert in these areas but have clocked about a year and a half working with low code platforms of customers including one platform which Measureworks builds and maintains on behalf of a client. Low code to me has meant a modular approach to application building where it’s possible to extend the existing building blocks or create custom ones when those out of the box do not fill all requirements. No code on the other hand seems to be based on black box, drag and drop modules that are generally not extendable or customizable although this is admittedly a second-hand impression. The former seem optimized to enabling existing dev teams to build more, faster while no code is likely targeting the “citizen developer” market, i.e. those with little or no development experience.

Based on the above assumptions and my own experience and impressions I’ve boiled NC/LC primary attributes into 3 buckets:

1.?????Platforms intended to work CI/CD by design and to enable dev teams to greatly increase productivity while lowering learning curves with among other things lots of abstraction

2.?????Platforms intended to enable the “citizen developer” to build apps and utilities with little or no coding experience with black-box type abstraction

3.?????Marketing

NC/LC platforms can contain any mix of the above three attributes with plenty of overlap between players. Platforms that are too heavy on point three above seem to be more likely to cause budget overages due to requiring a lot of custom code be built by specialists when use cases go a little off piste from what the platform provides out of the box. Hence, just like every other type of software, performing due diligence to ensure a platform is fit for your purposes remains as crucial as ever.

Types/Variations/Target sectors

This section could literally fill pages and pages with who offers what for which sectors, SaaS, self-hosted, in what flavors etc. There are parties specialized in health care, finance, government, e-commerce, you name it-if it’s an area that already exists as a specialized software market there’s probably one or more LC/NC providers active. This is especially true where a) commercial off the shelf software tends to require a high degree of customization and/or b) where the rate of innovation and/or change in the applications tends to be high.

In my research I read a lot of papers from the Gartners and Forresters of the world and if you would like to dig deeper into this particular topic I recommend you do as well. They’re pretty easy to come across just by searching on top low code/no code/ecommerce platforms etc. Vendors who scored high in a particular report will often offer copies for free for the usual price of giving up your work email address.

These IT research and consultancy companies are pretty restrictive of what you share from a report which is why you don’t see borrowed quotes and graphics in this piece. One observation I made however in the last available reports I could find from a company well known for, let’s call them “Enchanted Corners”, the reports on both top e-commerce platforms and top LC/NC platforms had zero overlap even though many established ecomm platforms are aggressively moving into the low code space. Interesting..

Just Because You Can Doesn’t Mean You Should

I’d like to close this part off with a bit of advice. Are you or your employer evaluating whether LC/NC would be a good fit for your business? Most sources I read through seemed to have a variation of the following advice, if the available commercial, off the shelf options will fill the requirements with less than say 25-30% customization then you may be better off sticking with off the shelf solutions. That said, I have come across plenty of situations where following this guideline could steer you straight into the LC/NC world.

Have you or your employer already made the decision to go down the LC/NC rabbit hole? Then you’ll definitely want to read PART 2 in this series where we’ll look into areas of performance and reliability management and testing related to LC/NC applications.