Low Code: The Future of Application Development

By Virender Jeet, Senior Vice President – Technology, Newgen Software

According to Gartner,the market demand for app development will grow at least five times faster than IT’s capacity to deliver through 2021. The shortage of high-skill IT resources can impact the overall operational efficiency, making it difficult for IT teams to meet the business requirements. Organizations need to find ways to deliver at a faster pace by empowering their IT and non-IT business users to develop applications easily and rapidly.

The Need For A Transformative Approach
Organizations come across various challenges while developing applications using traditional development tools due to the requirement of heavy coding. Below are some of the key bottlenecks they commonly face:

• Time-consuming application development processes, which restrict organizations from fulfilling the demand for a greater number of applications
• Lack of agility in traditional applications, making them unable to adapt to changing business dynamics. This results in an increased dependency on IT for managing, customizing, scaling, and provisioning new processes and applications
• High dependence on IT specialists, resulting in delays and affecting productivity in critical technical operations

Considering all this, it’s time for organizations to take a transformative approach—to move away from coding to building and deploying applications faster.

Low Code Platform – The Nuts and Bolts
According to Forrester, low-code development platforms have the potential to make software development as much as 10 times faster than traditional methods.  A low code platform supports rapid application development by employing visual tools to configure and develop applications. It allows business users, with little or no knowledge of coding, to develop applications using graphical wizards, drag and drop tools, and built-in templates for data, forms, workflows, logic, etc.

These low code application platforms use high-level programming abstraction that reduces application translation efforts through a model-driven, point-and-click application development environment. Furthermore, it allows developers to automate simple to moderately complex applications, without writing codes.

Below are some of the core capabilities of a low code platform that organizations should be wary of:
• Web-based, drag-and-drop application designer to develop business processes, facilitating real-time collaboration between business and IT developers
• Configurable and navigational user interface to configure applications, components, instances, external applications, and navigation between application components
• Dynamic case management capabilities to design and manage semi-structured to completely dynamic processes
• Master data management for application data modeling, which can be integrated with external systems
• Business rules management system to create, deploy, and manage critical business policies and procedures with agility
• Collaboration across multiple stakeholders during application design and execution through screen sharing, chat, discussion forums, and work desk sharing
• Enterprise mobility framework to develop, deploy, and manage highly configurable hybrid and native apps, with capabilities like geo-tagging, geo-fencing, offline support, and superior imaging
• Deployment flexibility for cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments through CI/CD pipeline management

To Conclude
In a nutshell, low code is a streamlined approach to building business applications with minimal coding requirements. Business developers can use visual and guided formats to translate their requirements into powerful new applications.  Businesses can gain considerable value when they leverage low code methodology along with traditional programming. They can use low code platforms for building most of the applications to establish core functionality and allow programmers to handle more complex and specialized functions.

However, while investing in a low code platform, organizations should opt for a platform that promotes democratization of application creation by enabling citizen development, and that allows programmers to spend more time on mission-critical, legacy applications.