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Tag: low-code apps

  • TechStrongCon: Time to Build an Army of Citizen Developers

    TechStrongCon: Time to Build an Army of Citizen Developers

    DevOps teams need to start drafting a strategy to support what will soon become an army of citizen developers.

    Speaking at the virtual TechStrongCon event, JP Morgenthal, global director for modern applications development at DXC Technology, told conference attendees that the time to build an army of citizen developers is now.

    Citizen developers are typically end users that have developed enough expertise to build an application using low-code or no-code tools. Most organizations don’t have enough professional developers to address their application development backlogs, so it’s imperative that they enable end users to build applications, noted Morgenthal.

    Those citizen developers, however, need to be supported by DevOps teams to ensure guardrails are in place for building secure applications that scale. In addition, DevOps involvement also reduces the friction that a citizen developer will most certainly encounter when building an application, he added. “DevOps is fundamental, “ said Morgenthal. “We need to invest in it heavily.”

    Otherwise, citizen developers—who typically have other tasks that require their attention—will simply abandon their application development efforts, he noted. “This is not their primary task,” said Morgenthal. “They are going to need to be nurtured.”

    Most professional developers are focused on applications that are systems of record. The problem is that there simply are not enough of them to build necessary applications to drive systems of engagement, noted Morgenthal.

    That increased reliance on citizen developers is, in fact, part of a larger wave of democratization of IT in which individuals that don’t have advanced technology degrees take advantage of automation to build and deploy applications, he added.

    Organizations, however, run into issues when they fail to test those applications, make sure that configurations are not manually changed or don’t address the technical debt that inevitably accrues over time, said Morgenthal.

    Burnout can also become an issue, so Morgenthal said organizations need to make sure that agile development practices are used to first create a minimally viable product (MVP) and then plan development sprints to update and maintain it.

    Finally, there also needs to be a plan in place for shifting responsibility for the application to someone else when the individual that created it eventually leaves the organization, he added.

    Citizen developers, of course, are not the only ones using low-code and no-code tools. Many professional developers are using those same tools to build applications faster. In fact, it’s not clear how many end users have the skills required to successfully build applications, even though low-code and no-code tools automate much of the process. One way or another, many professional developers are now also collaborating more frequently with end users to build applications using low-code/no-code tools that make it easier for end users to, at the very least, describe the workflow of the application they want to build and deploy.

    Regardless of who builds the application, it’s a given that a lot more code will be moving through DevOps pipelines in the months and years ahead. DevOps teams, as a result, will inevitably need to revisit workflows and platforms to continuously update and maintain those applications at scale.

  • The Future of Low-Code Development

    The Future of Low-Code Development

    The days when IT teams relied on clunky software development processes and labor-intensive hand-coding to build tangible, reliable and modern applications are coming to an end. With the rise of new automation technology, rapidly rising expectations and demands from innovation-craving customers and end users and a shortage of developers, the software sector has been forced to seek alternative approaches to not only deliver their services and products but to also remain digitally-current. Now, overcoming this challenge is possible with low-code development platforms.

    What is Low-Code Development and Why all the Fuss? 

    Low-code development is a software development practice that empowers digital product teams and citizen developers to build apps without time-consuming hand-coding. In general, a typical low-code platform includes a visual integrated development environment (IDE), connectors to various backends or services, an application life cycle manager and an integrated design-to-code system.

    With these features and attributes, low-code platforms:

    • Abstract away the code behind complex commands and actions
    • Streamline how projects are being innovated and distributed in the span of weeks, not months
    • Enable citizen developers to build apps

    These tools are so effective because they break the mold and automate the app development cycle by providing reusable building blocks. These building blocks can easily be assembled into an entire app, allowing both experienced and beginner technical minds to handle a bigger volume of projects faster than ever. This flexibility is handy, especially when the digital world expects over 500 million apps and digital services to be built and deployed by the end of 2023, according to IDC FutureScape. That is more than all of the software solutions created in the last four decades. 

    A report by Gartner forecasts that by 2024, low-code adoption will be so widespread that 75% of the software solutions built around the world will be made with the help of such tools. While these tools won’t entirely replace traditional software development, they deliver a contemporary, simpler and faster approach to building apps.

    Benefits of Low-Code Development

    Whether it is automating individual manual tasks, eliminating old development models like waterfall methodology or making it easier for a tech newbie to build a prototype or a flexible app, low-code development has many benefits.

    The benefits of low-code software include:     

    Innovative projects can be assembled by a non-technical audience 

    Low-code app builders are game-changers. The need for experienced coders is reduced as this type of tool provides the necessary components and building blocks for non-technical audiences to be involved in full-cycle app development. Another recent Gartner report said that 80% of technology products and services will be created by people outside of tech-driven fields by 2024. And in times when the demand for commercial software, new progressive solutions and skilled developers exceeds the supply, low-code tools are a perfect fit for citizen developers, designers, professional developers, non-technical stakeholders and others.

    Velocity and optimized development cost

    Today, speed is everything. IT businesses and clients require their software to be built within short timeframes and within a strict budget. Legacy systems need rapid modernization without a big investment. One of the greatest advantages of low-code tools is that they let people build at scale without incurring heavy costs or consuming too much time. Automation apps, mission-critical systems and mobile applications can all be created with low-code software.

    Reinventing traditional processes and reshaping how software is built

    Using these automation tools, you don’t have to worry about HTML/CSS, scalability, coding rules, page layout, branding or screen sizes. As mentioned above, some low-code development platforms come with a system that covers everything from design to code and generates production-ready code in the end. Designers and developers come together to use a single platform that simultaneously:

    • Allows them to create solutions that are easy to maintain and that scale on cloud-native architecture
    • Modernizes and facilitates their work 
    • Improves productivity and collaboration
    • Fits their workflow and skills

    Low-code/no-code tools are quickly becoming the next prototyping tools in the enterprise—without needing the technical skills in traditional UX/visual designer-focused tooling. With low-code or no-code tools, screen design is typically done using drag-and-drop, WYSIWYG design-time experience; it’s usually as simple as making a PowerPoint deck. The main difference between this and a UX/visual design tool is that the low-code/no-code tool is building a running app in the background, with real code, connected data, real screen interactions and more. This means that any team member with an idea can express the design, not just a person who has access to a designer.

    No special skills are needed to build something tangible and real—while at the same time going beyond what a mockup or prototype can deliver.

    The future of tools in this space will include connectors and adapters to popular design tools, such as Sketch, Figma and Adobe XD. These connectors and adapters will enable digital product teams—designers and developers—to use a design process and then import designs, interactions, branding and themes into low-code tools, while still obtaining the considerable benefits of time and cost savings of not having to re-build screens that have already been designed pixel-perfect.

  • 7 Steps to Unleashing Your Citizen Developers

    7 Steps to Unleashing Your Citizen Developers

    As digital transformation accelerates, organizations are searching for ways to enable all their employees—not just IT, development or DevOps teams—to design, build, iterate and launch new processes and applications as per their requirements. This democratizing approach is called citizen development—where business users are empowered to create their own processes and apps with only minimal supervision from IT, ultimately relieving them from IT backlogs. 

    How to Get Started with Citizen Development

    Running a citizen development program doesn’t mean relegating IT to the sidelines. Citizen developers can often be prone to mistakes due to their lack of programming background. Limited skills may also result in creating a faulty app or unknowingly developing one that resembles existing software that serves the same purpose.

    Thus, citizen development calls for a new relational approach that’s founded on transparency, trust and dialogue between IT specialists and non-IT employees. 

    As a business leader, you’re in the best position to initiate such a program. Here are the steps you can take to get you started: 

    1. Identify citizen development potential

    You can issue surveys across departments or meet with division heads to understand who is using forms of shadow IT or already using citizen development tools, what they’re using these for and the number of users of these apps. Your findings can help you assess which departments have the most citizen developer candidates.

    Also, determine your company’s backlog of IT requests and current IT pain points. Knowing the pent-up demand will give you an idea of what issues citizen developers can seek to resolve.

    2. Set clear goals

    Communicate what citizen development aims to accomplish for your organization. Identify the apps you intend to create, the mode of deployment, the role of citizen developers and which departments will benefit.

    3. Get support from IT and fellow business leaders

    Find partners in the IT team and among other managers who can help champion your vision for citizen development. 

    First, approach the potential managers who will be collaborating with you in this cause. Getting their support early can aid you in establishing a more well-rounded vision and avoiding any conflicts down the road. By helping them understand how it will actually boost their department’s workflows instead of delaying internal tasks, you’d be able to muster credibility for your proposal.

    Meanwhile, assure your IT team that there’ll be a clear delineation of responsibilities between citizen developers and IT personnel. Employees will undergo self-directed and group training before being allowed to access a development environment. The software development life cycle will also be documented to make citizen developers aware of the process and necessary requirements for submitting their ideas. Moreover, IT developers will still be in charge of providing documentation, evaluating ideas and offering technical guidance with regular check-ins.

    4. Shortlist low-code/no-code platforms according to your business needs

    It would be best to look for low-code platform providers, schedule demos and invite IT and business unit leaders during dedicated sessions. They can compare feature sets and appraise learning curves with you. 

    5. Lay down a governance plan

    A governance plan ensures that data security best practices are in place and that IT assistance is well-defined in your citizen development program. Such a plan should cover:

    • The evaluation process for admitting projects into the citizen developer backlog or IT backlog
    • Standard compliance and security requirements for any project accepted for citizen development
    • Standard workflow protocols including testing, validation, audit and integration
    • What instances will require IT involvement

    6. Get senior management buy-in

    You’ll need to communicate your intentions with your senior executives and prepare to formally present your citizen development plan. 

    • Establish the rationale behind the plan. Compare internal metrics with industry stats showing the current need for citizen developers. Cite success stories or case studies.
    • Share internal figures pointing to the current IT backlog as well as results of surveys and discussions with employees and fellow managers.
    • Calculate and show your company’s projected one- to five-year ROI for using low-code/no-code platforms for citizen development.
    • Introduce your proposed governance plan and pilot program.

    7. Start training

    The citizen developers should be given time to learn the selected low-code/no-code platform. You can later pick a use case to pilot the tool. Identify your expectations and criteria to measure the success of the project.

  • ServiceNow Acquires Intellibot to Gain RPA Capabilities

    ServiceNow Acquires Intellibot to Gain RPA Capabilities

    ServiceNow’s acquisition of Intellibot, a provider of a robotic process automation (RPA) platform, this week is part of a larger effort to automate the development of applications that are driving digital business transformation within enterprise IT environments.

    Earlier this month, ServiceNow unfurled a set of revamped low-code tools that both professional and so-called citizen developers could employ to build applications to modernize various business processes. However, many existing business processes are either manual or paper-based. An RPA platform enables organizations to create bots that mimic, within an application environment, the way those processes are currently managed.

    Josh Kahn, senior vice president for Creator Workflow Products at ServiceNow, said ServiceNow envisions the Intelligent RPA platform as a mechanism to automate rote processes that, for one reason or another, don’t manifest themselves via a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that application developers can easily invoke.

    Each IT team, of course, will need to decide when it makes more sense to employ bots to digitize an existing workflow versus reengineering it using a set of custom applications infused with machine learning algorithms and natural language processing (NLP) capabilities. As digital business transformation initiatives become more urgent, the application development backlog within many enterprise IT organizations that require those capabilities is steadily increasing.

    However, in some cases, an RPA platform can reduce that backlog by surfacing a set of visual tools to automate a process that doesn’t require a lot of developer expertise to effectively digitize.

    In general, Kahn said ServiceNow is making a case for building a wide range of applications on top of the same software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform many internal IT teams already employ for IT service management (ITSM). That approach enables IT teams to streamline processes as the number of custom applications that need to be both developed and, ultimately, managed, steadily increases over time, Kahn said.

    The developers of those applications might be professionals using a low-code tool instead of writing additional code to quickly build an application, or it might be a “power user” that has enough understanding of software development best practices to build an application. Regardless of who builds the application, the rate at which applications are built using low-code tools is clearly about to accelerate.

    Kahn said the next step for ServiceNow will be to embed the Intellibot RPA capabilities in the ServiceNow platform sometime after the deal closes in the second quarter. In fact, one of the reasons ServiceNow opted to acquire Intellibot is because, as a smaller startup vendor, it is easier to incorporate their RPA platform than it would be to reengineer a much larger RPA platform. However, ServiceNow remains committed to integrating with other third-party RPA platforms that are already being employed by its customers, Kahn noted.

    Regardless of how or at what rate applications are developed, the number of core technologies required to build them continues to expand. The issue IT organizations will need to come to terms with is the degree to which they want to stitch all those tools together themselves, or rely on a platform to do it for them.

  • Copado Acquires New Context to Drive DevSecOps Adoption

    Copado Acquires New Context to Drive DevSecOps Adoption

    Copado, a provider of a DevOps platform for building applications deployed on the Salesforce cloud platform, announced today it has acquired New Context as part of an effort to expand the scope of its portfolio into the realm of DevSecOps best practices.

    Andrew Leigh, chief marketing officer for Copado, said the acquisition brings Copado tools and professional services expertise that will be applied to help organizations build and deploy secure, custom applications on top of the same cloud platform they already use to access a range of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.

    The New Context Lean Security Intelligence Platform enables developers to achieve that goal by analyzing code and then surfacing recommendations for when developers should apply specific security controls, Leigh explained. Existing New Context customers include Blue Shield of California, GE, Kaiser Permanente and Royal Dutch Shell.

    Like most organizations that have embraced DevOps best practices, it’s still early days as far as adoption of DevSecOps are concerned. However, it’s already apparent that Copado is well-positioned to advance adoption of a complementary Lean Security Intelligence Platform, said Leigh. Copado, which claims to have more than 1,000 customers, recently raised an additional $96 million in funding to help fuel those efforts. The company also claims it recorded 120% growth in annual recurring revenue (ARR).

    In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, more organizations are employing SaaS applications to drive digital business transformation initiatives. Rather than building every application from the ground up, it is often simpler to extend, for example, a Salesforce customer relationship management (CRM) application.

    Once organizations reach a certain level of scale, they then start to apply DevOps best practices to those builds. These efforts, however, are often uneven. A recent survey, conducted on behalf of Copado, found that while 82% have increased or maintained the size of their Salesforce development teams, the change fail rate jumped from 23% last year to 33% in 2020 when compared to a similar survey conducted a year ago. The survey also notes time to recover increased from 110 hours in 2019 to nearly 196 hours in 2020.

    The next major challenge facing organizations that have embraced DevOps is, of course, DevSecOps. The challenge is that, since Salesforce environments are unique, applications are constructed using a set of objects and tables that are specific to that platform. As such, Salesforce environments generally require a DevOps platform designed from the ground up to work with objects and tables.

    Salesforce, in its most recent fourth quarter, reported revenue of $5.82 billion, up 20% year-over-year despite the lingering economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. As such, the number of custom applications being developed on top of Salesforce should steadily increase, especially as low-code tools become more widely adopted. It’s now only a matter of time before more organizations reach application development initiative critical mass that warrants investing in a DevOps platform to manage them.

  • Accelerate Digital Transformation With Low Code

    Accelerate Digital Transformation With Low Code

    This year many organizations have gone through a lot of changes due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Businesses need to be more agile, adapt to the new normal and accelerate their digital transformation. We have a new future of work we need to be ready for, and that requires more automation than ever before. Low code enables organizations to accelerate their innovation, automation and transformation efforts. Low-code platforms enable developers and non-technical teams to quickly deliver applications by automating the creation of apps with a drag-and-drop interface.

    In this interview, ServiceNow CIO Chris Bedi shares the main benefits of low code and talks about the ServiceNow Citizen Developer Program.

    Chris is one of our distinguished keynote speakers presenting at Low Code Today Virtual Summit. During his keynote presentation, Chris will share a CIO perspective on rolling out low-code applications at scale, best practices from rolling out ServiceNow Citizen Developer Program and suggested guardrails to ensure a successful and secure implementation.

    To find out more about the future of work with low code and how it can benefit your business, attend Chris’ session at Low Code Today Virtual Summit on Nov. 19. To check out the full agenda or to register for free, visit the Low Code Today website.