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Tag: Low-Code/No-Code

  • Revolutionizing DevOps With Low-Code/No-Code Platforms

    Revolutionizing DevOps With Low-Code/No-Code Platforms

    The DevOps industry is growing at an incredible pace, with its worth exceeding $8 billion in 2022. Analysts predict that the market will experience a five-fold increase and reach almost $40 billion by the end of the decade. But with this growth, there is a significant issue within the DevOps chain that continues to escalate: A widening talent gap. The U.S. Department of Labor predicted that by 2030, the global deficit of development engineers will exceed 85 million. Additionally, the demand for DevOps professionals is expected to increase by over 20% annually throughout the rest of the decade. These conflicting trends present significant challenges for software and application companies. While there is a substantial opportunity to generate revenue by creating new and better applications, the shortage of skilled personnel to develop these products is a significant roadblock. Integrating low-code and no-code tools into the DevOps process could be a viable solution to address the talent gap. These tools offer various benefits and efficiencies, including streamlining the work of existing DevOps professionals and enabling organizations to expand their teams beyond traditional personnel sources. Leveraging these tools could give companies in the DevOps industry a competitive advantage.

    Challenges of Traditional DevOps

    Traditional DevOps practices pose significant challenges for companies that hinder productivity and overall success. The first significant issue is the talent shortage. According to a report by the Manpower Group, 75% of employers consider finding tech talent their primary concern. As the demand for experienced DevOps professionals continues to grow, it is becoming increasingly difficult for companies to find the right personnel.

    Another significant challenge in traditional DevOps practices is the high learning curve. The prediction by Gartner that 75% of DevOps initiatives would fail to meet expectations by 2023 highlights the severity of the learning curve and the challenges associated with adopting DevOps practices without proper training and experience.

    To avoid delays, increased costs, and suboptimal productivity, companies should explore innovative solutions such as low-code and no-code platforms. This would enable citizen developers to contribute to the development process and streamline infrastructure management processes, enabling greater efficiency and scalability in their DevOps practices.

    How Low-Code/No-Code Revolutionize DevOps

    Low-code/no-code platforms are gaining widespread recognition for their potential to drive app development across organizations, as Gartner predicts that by 2024, 80% of apps will be developed by non-IT professionals. The adoption of these productivity tools can bring significant benefits to the DevOps landscape, particularly in the following ways.

    Reducing Workloads and Stress
    By using low-code and no-code software, organizations can distribute basic app-building and basic development tasks across the organization, freeing up skilled developers’ time and reducing their workload and stress. This significantly improves the workplace experience and enables developers to focus their time on delivering more complex, high-quality solutions.

    Accelerating Innovation With Low-Code/No-Code Platforms
    Low-code/no-code platforms can accelerate innovation by enabling developers to quickly spin up proofs-of-concept for more complex software development tasks that require coding expertise. Ideas and solutions can be tested before investing time and resources in full-scale development.

    Creating New Roles and Opportunities
    No-code platforms can create new roles and opportunities within the enterprise, such as no-code projects focused on optimizing processes and building solutions. Citizen developers without coding experience can pursue new career paths and opportunities to contribute to their companies’ success. One example is applying no-code technology to digitize paper forms across organizations. Employees without coding experience can create mobile apps that speed data collection, improve data accuracy and allow for instant digital data sharing and analysis.

    Giving Developers a More Strategic Role
    With tactical software development carried out within business units, developers can spend more of their time focused on cutting-edge technologies like mixed reality, quantum computing, and AI. This can give them a more strategic role in the enterprise and enable them to focus on the “next big thing.”

    Considerations and Challenges

    While low-code/no-code platforms have the potential to offer numerous benefits to DevOps teams, it’s important to be aware of challenges that have arisen when pairing the two successfully, and how to avoid them.

    Poorly-Designed or Insecure Applications
    With non-IT professionals developing applications, there is a higher risk of introducing vulnerabilities that could compromise the security of the application and the organization. Additionally, the lack of oversight and governance could lead to poor coding practices and technical debt. For instance, the use of new-generation iPaaS platforms by citizen integrators has made it difficult for security leaders to have full visibility into the organization’s valuable assets. Attackers are aware of this and have already taken advantage of improperly secured app-to-app connections in recent supply chain attacks, such as those experienced by Microsoft and GitHub.

    Companies need to make sure IT staff carefully check how low-code and no-code technologies are adopted and how apps are reviewed in order to reduce vulnerabilities.

    Limited Customization and Scalability
    While low-code/no-code platforms can help speed up application development by up to ten times, their limitations can create hurdles when building large, complex applications. These platforms can be useful for basic application development, but they may not be suitable for complex or highly-customized applications. For example, if your app requires robust offline capability that handles conflict resolution and on-device offline storage, you’re better off selecting a low-code platform like Alpha Anywhere than a drag-and-drop app builder like Appypie, which is a fit for less complex apps.

    Complex Integrations With Legacy Systems
    As organizations try to integrate low-code and no-code applications with legacy systems or other third-party applications, technical challenges can arise. For example, if an organization wants to integrate a low-code application with an existing ERP system, it may face challenges in terms of data mapping and synchronization. Some low-code and no-code applications are built to export data and share it well, but when it comes to integrating event triggers, business logic, or workflows, these software solutions hit limits. Buyers need to consider their requirements carefully before making a purchase.

    To address the potential challenges of low-code/no-code platforms, organizations must establish governance policies and procedures to ensure adherence to security and quality standards. This includes implementing proper access controls with zero-trust security, data privacy measures and vulnerability management processes. Organizations should work with their low-code/no-code platform providers to ensure seamless integration with other systems and scalability to support evolving needs. Along with this, regular assessments and audits of applications developed using low-code/no-code platforms can also help identify and address security risks before they turn into significant issues.

    Conclusion

    The integration of low-code/no-code platforms into DevOps practices represents a promising solution to address current challenges in the industry. By leveraging these platforms, organizations can expand their teams beyond traditional personnel sources and create a more inclusive environment for non-IT professionals to contribute to the development process. The rise of no-code is a win-win for everyone, and as early adopters seize this opportunity, they can gain a significant competitive advantage in the market. The future of DevOps is exciting, and the potential of low-code/no-code development is limitless, unlocking the innovation potential of all employees and empowering them to make a difference in their organizations.

  • Can ChatGPT Fix Bugs? ‘Wolverine’ Dev Says YES

    Can ChatGPT Fix Bugs? ‘Wolverine’ Dev Says YES

    Welcome to The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.

    This week: Instead of AI aids for programming, what about for debugging? The pseudonymous “BioBootloader” says he’s persuaded GPT-4 to make his code self heal. (more…)

  • How the ‘Great Rebalance’ Accelerates Low-Code/No-Code Adoption

    How the ‘Great Rebalance’ Accelerates Low-Code/No-Code Adoption

    If you were just reading headlines, you would think that careers in tech were limited—especially developers and DevOps professionals. The media and job sites have highlighted layoffs weekly since the beginning of the year, with over 120,000 employees eliminated from 400+ companies (including Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta and others). With this much shedding of technical talent, you would think there would be a glut of developers and limited new career opportunities for software developers.

    In fact, the opposite appears to be true. In the U.S., job growth accelerated sharply in January while the unemployment rate dropped to a 53-year low. According to a recent report from Bain & Company, at a macro level, the demand for technical talent is still high but is now growing within non-tech industries. “The growth of demand for tech talent from non-tech business has really been a game-changer,” said Jonathan Frick, a partner at Bain and one of the study’s authors. Using publicly available job postings and U.S. government data, Bain determined that demand for tech workers at non-tech businesses outpaces demand at tech businesses for the first time.

    So is the “Great Resignation” now being replaced by the “Great Rebalance” as other industries finally catch up and have the opportunity to find and hire technical talent? That appears to partly be true; however, there’s a bigger takeaway than developer talent is simply changing employers … it’s a more fundamental and structural shift in the industry. As talent moves beyond traditional tech firms, non-tech businesses seek to apply software innovation differently. So let’s discuss why this sets the stage for 2023 being “the year of no-code.”

    Continuing Demand for Digital Apps

    It’s been said that “every business is now a software business” (in the words of Watts S. Humphrey, the father of quality in software and CMMI). Businesses of all sizes and across all industries have taken advantage of software to enable sweeping digital transformation initiatives and put software at the heart of their business strategy. In fact, IDC predicts that by this year, over 500 million digital apps and services will be developed and deployed using cloud-native approaches – the same number of apps developed in the last 40 years. The majority of these new apps will be targeted at industry-specific digital transformation scenarios and will define competitive requirements in every industry.

    This exploding appetite for digital apps still vastly outstrips the supply of developers in the market. As a result, non-tech organizations have been desperately seeking new and creative solutions to keep up with demand. This is one of the key reasons businesses across all industries and all sizes have turned to no-code. By accelerating the pace of developing software, using visual and intuitive drag-and-drop tools, no-code levels the playing field and enables more rapid delivery of digital applications without having to wait on scarce IT or development resources.

    Headcount Budgets Remain Constrained

    Non-tech organizations tend to be more pragmatic about how they invest – unlike tech firms, they are less likely to simply invest in “shiny new technology” but look for stricter business justifications and returns on development projects. Also, the overall continued market uncertainty and concerns about recession will continue to pressure businesses to get the most value from their investments. So even though it may be easier to find developers in the talent pool, there’s not a blank check to hire at any price.

    This will drive non-tech organizations to look for ways to enable app development within their business teams as part of a ‘do it yourself” (DIY) approach to software development. The DIY approach enables business teams to play a more central role in app development using low-code/no-code solutions. By democratizing app development, low-code/no-code enables a whole new range of non-developer roles (often referred to as “citizen developers”) within an organization to take on the building of software applications. While IT and professional developers are still important for certain types of apps, the use of no-code has increased the talent pool inside most organizations, allowing employees within the business to take on development tasks.

    Non-Tech Organizations Accountable for Everyday Delivery

    Startups in the tech industry have been accustomed to a traditional venture life cycle of innovation – which has historically been accepting of years of challenges as long as the startup could demonstrate rapid growth at all costs; a single successful exit would be seen as a reward. However, non-tech firms don’t usually have the luxury of this sort of development model and are under scrutiny to show profitability and quarterly earnings. Non-tech businesses look for approaches to accelerate new sources of sales or add new products to market more quickly. They need to exploit app development strategies that deliver results in days/weeks (not months/years).

    Instead, an ‘everyday delivery’ approach to no-code is much more evolutionary and provides a continual but rapid stream of updates to the end user as part of a high-velocity, ongoing improvement cycle. The deployment can be based on specific features without a need to connect it to a specific Agile sprint deadline or other formal milestones. This mode of continuous everyday delivery builds on the rapid development and continuous deployment automation provided by low-code/no-code platforms. Combined, this allows for quick, small updates to be pushed frequently (perhaps daily) to production while maintaining higher levels of quality than traditional “big bang” software releases.

    Conclusion

    They say every challenge presents new opportunities. While the recent tech layoffs would appear to create challenges and uncertainty, “The Great Rebalance” presents an opportunity for a new accelerated model of innovation across industries as non-technical businesses find new and different models for software development. In the dynamic and unpredictable markets we live in today, those who evolve and leverage low-code/no-code to compete, expand and thrive will outgrow and outpace their peers.  This is why businesses are hungrily adopting low-code/no-code tools and everyday delivery approaches to realize the benefits of accelerating time-to-market and reducing time to deliver results.

  • Why Low-Code/No-Code Tech is Important in a Competitive Job Market

    Why Low-Code/No-Code Tech is Important in a Competitive Job Market

    The demand for tech professionals is increasing exponentially as digital skills become a requirement for businesses. However, the world is facing a serious shortage of tech professionals. According to a forecast by the World Economic Forum, 50% of the world’s labor force will need to upskill in order to keep pace with technological advancements and automation. Similarly, digital transformation will change over one billion jobs. Yet the majority of workers around the world lack the digital skills to meet the demands of their jobs. According to a recent study, three in four employers in the world (data from 40 countries) claim a work shortage. On the other hand, millions of young people find themselves unemployed as they lack the basic digital skills for in-demand jobs. Low-code/no-code software solutions can offer a solution to this labor shortage and close the gap for workers who quickly need to acquire digital skills. Proficiency in low-code/no-code applications will provide candidates with a competitive edge in the job market.

    Low-code/no-code software allows citizen developers and business experts to build business applications without requiring high technical expertise. With citizen development becoming an important part of all organizations’ business strategy, the demand for workers with proficiency in low-code/no-code app development is increasing. Expertise in low-code/no-code app development has become an expected skill set for potential employees.

    Benefits of Low-Code/No-Code App Development

    Citizen Development

    As discussed above, digital skills are becoming a part of almost all technical jobs. Employees should be proficient in using technology to streamline data collection, automate daily processes and leverage mobile technology. To achieve digital transformation, employees should be acquainted with advancements in digital technologies. This is where the skills gap seeps in. Learning code is not an easy task. It requires a lot of time, patience and effort. Add mobile development skills to the list, and there’s an even larger skills gap. Low-code/no-code app development can play a major role in addressing the skills gap. With pre-built apps and components, low-code/no-code development platforms offer an intuitive environment for designing software without the need to be proficient in coding. Such platforms can be easily used by people without programming skills to build flexible interfaces their companies need. However, low code can also be used by IT departments to deliver faster digital solutions while freeing up time to focus on more complex coding tasks.

    Additionally, low-code naturally aligns with the millennial proclivity to be digitally savvy. This generation is more comfortable than ever with using digital technologies in all aspects of their lives. Thus, they are more inclined and open to using low-code/no-code platforms and gaining some expertise in the domain.

    Empowering Users

    Low-code/no-code platforms empower citizen developers or business users to “skill up” in an increasingly digital society. By empowering business users to develop applications without the need for coding, low-code generates jobs directly or indirectly. The rate of technological advancement tells us that it is no longer favorable for companies to take months to develop a single app. Since the software has a life of three to five years, taking several months to develop apps is not conducive to the competitive market. As such, low-code/no-code app development can empower business users to develop applications quickly. However, citizen developers should work with IT management to ensure that the app adheres to all the company’s compliance requirements and governance guidelines. This is because citizen developers may not be proficient in scaling apps.

    Business Experts Understand Business Application Need

    Business needs are continuously evolving, especially since after the pandemic, when so many people are remote or using mobile apps to run businesses. At this rapid pace, it is not always easy for IT departments to continuously craft new apps and immediately update apps to match evolving circumstances and needs.

    Business users who are close to daily tasks, data collection requirements and ongoing processes, are in an excellent position to understand urgent needs for specific business applications. As a result, business users are in a much better position to collect department requirements and propose an application that caters to those specific needs. In such situations, low-code or no-code development solutions equip business users to develop applications directly based on their needs.

    How Can Low-Code/No-Code Help Employees Advance Their Careers?

    As discussed above, low-code has tremendous potential and benefits in the current digitally charged environment. Here are some benefits for candidates learning low-code skills:

    1. Bridge Business and IT

    Low-code/no-code is an easy entry point for someone in their early career phases interested in working in the IT department. By learning low-code solutions for streamlining business processes and automating workflows, employees can take a step towards interfacing with IT departments or understanding the basics of coding. With necessary low-code skills, employees can also become leaders in cross-functional groups or digital transformation teams responsible for introducing low-code/no-code solutions and rapidly introducing new business applications. There is a huge gap in this space, as only 29% of IT leaders feel confident that they have the right training mechanisms for non-developers to build applications.

    2. Increase Your Salary

    As employees grow their low-code skills, their salaries will correspondingly increase to reflect digital proficiency. Since low-code/no-code skills will increase in demand, proficient users will make significant gains in terms of the salary offered by major companies. Glassdoor suggests that the average base salary of a workflow automation specialist in the U.S. is $81,335 per year, while that of a data analyst is just $69,517 per year.

    3. Higher Job Satisfaction

    A full 71% of employees expect their work organizations to provide them with the same level of service using technology that customers’ products provide. Organizations can introduce low-code/no-code applications within the organization to increase the level of employee satisfaction.

    Low-code/no-code skills are becoming highly coveted in the current competitive job market. Offering benefits to both employees and organizations, low-code app development is the key to digital transformation.

  • How Will Low-Code and AI Coexist?

    How Will Low-Code and AI Coexist?

    Over the last few years, low-code solutions have become important to help organizations widen programming accessibility to a broader base of users and help fill development gaps. And these technologies are still gathering steam—Gartner estimated the market for low-code development technologies would grow to a total of $26.9 billion in 2023 and that 65% of applications would be developed using low-code by 2024.

    However, AI-based code generation is set to further level the playing field with advanced auto-completion and AI coding assistants. Take GitHub’s Copilot, a helpful AI pair programmer, or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which can generate complex functions given natural language prompts. Other AI tools trained on UIs, like Galileo, can derive frontends for any project in a matter of seconds. So, are low-code development platforms still relevant in this new paradigm of AI-driven software development? If so, how will low-code solutions and AI coexist?

    Well, generic algorithms can only go so far in creating truly unique and innovative experiences that solve real-world business cases. And since most programmers don’t have the skills to train machine learning or deep learning models from their own datasets, this is one area where low-code solutions could lower the barrier, enabling users to tag unstructured data, generate models, run simulations and share reusable AI across departments.

    I recently chatted with Johanna Pingel, MathWorks AI product marketing manager, to discuss the role of AI in low-code programming. According to Pingel, low-code solutions can lower the barrier to AI functionality, both in quickly integrating AI-driven functionality into applications and seamlessly generating new AI algorithms based on unique datasets. Below, we’ll consider some additional use cases for AI and how low-code platforms may work alongside it.

    Use Cases For AI

    First off, what are application developers using AI for these days? Well, AI has an increasingly wide range of uses. It began with computer image and processing, such as identifying cats and dogs or postal codes. Now, voice recognition, voice-to-text and text-to-voice are commonplace, and AI is being used to create ever more sophisticated applications. One area that Pingel is excited about is applying AI to help with battery life management, predicting the lifespan of batteries for electric vehicles and consumer electronics.

    “Anywhere there’s data, there’s an opportunity to create models and make predictions based on that data,” said Pingel. This especially rings true for scenarios involving data and visualization. For example, consider visual inspection in a pharmaceutical production line to ensure there are no defects with any pills. Another use case is visual inspections of parts in automotive assembly lines. Applied to these scenarios, AI can remove grunt work and make production safer and more efficient.

    ChatGPT is another example of an AI application quickly becoming mainstream, not only for content creators but for scientific research. For example, ChatGPT can spin up MATLAB code and create functions and unit tests, which can be copied and pasted into IDEs. However, code written by ChatGPT should still be checked and verified by engineers and scientists to ensure its accuracy, said Pingel.

    How Low-Code Lowers the Barrier to Bespoke AI

    Low-code solutions can bring many benefits—these platforms help to speed up tedious tasks and level the playing field for those with different coding abilities and desires, said Pingel. Low-code platforms can also be a great tool for engineers looking to incorporate AI into their business systems. For example, having a low-code method could be helpful in generating code for machine learning algorithms and new models, which can help companies create their own algorithms and incorporate them into their own platforms.

    More people are interested in incorporating AI into their applications, but the use cases are growing increasingly more sophisticated. Businesses may start with simple needs, such as identifying faces or identifying text from handwritten letters. These rely on simple datasets, and algorithms already exist to accomplish most of these tasks. Off-the-shelf AI is helpful at the start, but eventually, companies tend to want to use their own data and settings far more specific to their applications, said Pingel.

    For example, a more niche case could be as specific as identifying cracks in a windshield. Or, in a financial industry, it might be analyzing mass amounts of loan applications to determine approval rates. In these situations, using your own internal data becomes necessary to create AI that understands the situation at hand. Yet, the hard part is assembling this data in a way that is accessible for a model to comprehend. Analysts estimate that upwards of 90% of data held within enterprises is unstructured, meaning it requires a heavy amount of tagging to become usable for AI/ML.

    Low-code is a perfect solution to avoid the point-and-click aspects of cleaning, cropping and structuring this data, said Pingel. This can introduce automation into the process of labeling data while still involving some human intervention to fix mistakes. Machine learning models can take a while to train and simulate, underlining the need for a fast way of iterating on models. A common platform could help companies develop custom machine learning algorithms and models and keep track of experiments. This helps to ensure that the most effective model is used for the final application.

    End Benefits of Democratized AI With Low-Code

    Overall, low-code platforms can provide a number of benefits that lower the barrier to unique AI creations. Low-code platforms like MATLAB and Simulink are useful for structuring and labeling data and quickly generating ML models. Low-code also makes it easier to bridge different programming languages and quickly generate code for a variety of different languages, such as C, C++ and Java.

    Additionally, low-code platforms enable users to collaborate easily with other users. But low-code doesn’t mean no-code, Pingel explained. In fact, “you can learn to be a better programming through low-code tools, too,” she said. For example, it could enhance understanding of the structure and syntax of code.

    In general, democratized AI is an important capability for businesses to take advantage of. Although AI-based solutions are coming to market to displace old tools and processes, there is still an argument to be made for low-code—namely in empowering non-technical users and lowering the barrier to creating custom AI-driven functionality.

  • No-Code Automated Software Solves a Host of Problems

    No-Code Automated Software Solves a Host of Problems

    There’s a huge disconnect in corporate America, and it’s costing companies big time. The disconnect involves software testing, or, more precisely, the lack of it. More than nine out of 10 CEOs are confident that their company’s software is tested regularly, yet roughly eight out of 10 product testers reported that up to 40% of their software goes out the door with insufficient testing. This dichotomy came to light in the latest Leapwork survey of 500 CEOs and software testers.

    The consequences of untested software are potentially dire and far from hypothetical. Flawed software that delayed the launch of new car models contributed to the dismissal of Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess, while Facebook saw its market cap value plummet by billions in 2021 when a software glitch came to light. 

    It’s not as if anyone is unaware of such risks: A whopping 95% of CEOs surveyed admitted they’re concerned about losing their jobs if a software failure occurs, while 76% of testers shared that concern. Those feelings are certainly valid, as more than three out of four CEOs reported that software failures damaged their companies’ reputations during the past five years.  

    Despite these realizations, CEOs seem willing to gamble. A full 85% said they considered it acceptable to release software that wasn’t adequately tested, as long as it can be patched later. That attitude has made patching standard operating procedure. More than half the testers said their teams spend five to 10 days a year patching software. 

    Why are organizations willing to take unnecessary risks by releasing software that’s potentially not ready for prime time? There are several common reasons—and a solution that many are overlooking. 

    The Problem with Manual Testing

    One of the major problems is the continued reliance on manual testing, which requires time and resources companies can’t afford. Only 43% of testers said they use automation to some extent in their testing, proving that the majority of testing is still a manual process.  

    That significantly slows product development, an issue for businesses anxious to get their products to market before the competition. Nearly 40% of CEOs said the time-consuming nature of manual testing is one of the primary reasons they release programs that haven’t been properly vetted. Testers clearly feel the crunch, with about one in three saying faster development cycles don’t allow enough time for testing. 

    Given the choice between rushing through testing or delaying a release, companies often roll the dice and opt for the former.  

    Two recent pandemic-related trends have made the situation even more difficult. More organizations are embracing digital platforms to cope with the effects of COVID-19 on their businesses, increasing the need for IT talent. At the same time, upheaval in the labor market has resulted in widespread resignations and job hopping, contributing to a serious shortage of skilled IT personnel. 

    The Coding Conundrum

    Even in this chaotic business climate, experienced software developers remain a hot commodity, with many career options at their fingertips. The competition for talent has left many IT teams scrambling and understaffed, making it difficult to produce high-quality software at a breakneck pace.  

    Eliminating the need for manual testing could relieve the pressure to a great extent. By automating testing, organizations can reduce the burden on staff and minimize the risk of errors caused by deadline pressures. That would allow more testing of more software in less time, which would help move product out the door and into the hands of customers. 

    But automated testing isn’t without its challenges, as many organizations have discovered. Many solutions that are billed as “low code” still demand coding skills beyond the capability of typical business users and testers. That need for coding is an obstacle that can drag down the pace of testing and make it difficult for business users to participate in the process.    

    That challenge grows as the need for ongoing maintenance expands. The test engineers who came on board to set up an automation solution can find themselves bogged down in maintaining code. As a result, speed to market continues to suffer. 

    Democratizing the Test Process

    There is a solution: true no-code test platforms. This type of solution allows both testers and business users to design, run and maintain tests without the need for coding. Business users who understand how the software deliverables are supposed to grow business can be intimately involved in testing, which enhances the quality and functionality of the product and the satisfaction of customers. 

    It also promotes speed. When testing is largely automated and more people are involved, it’s possible to test more software in less time. This eliminates bottlenecks and addresses the issue of scale. The use of automation on a no-code platform has been shown to speed time to market by a factor of 10—an improvement that largely eliminates the need to rush potentially flawed software to market without adequate testing.   

    Organizations can position themselves to meet the growing demand for digital solutions by revamping the way they test software. By eliminating manual testing and adopting an automated platform that doesn’t require coding skills, they can afford to test all their products thoroughly. The end result: They can minimize the risk of bugs that could undermine their success and threaten job security.  

  • SAP Adds Low-Code Platform to Build Custom Apps Faster

    SAP Adds Low-Code Platform to Build Custom Apps Faster

    At the SAP TechEd 2022 conference, SAP SE today announced it has added a low-code platform, dubbed SAP Build, to its portfolio to make it simpler for organizations to build custom applications.

    Sebastian Schrötel, vice president and head of low-code/no-code solutions for SAP, said SAP Build is designed to make the company’s low-code tools more accessible to a wider range of developers, including so-called citizen developers that generally don’t have a lot of programming expertise.

    The goal is to make it possible to monitor, analyze and automate processes by leveraging more than 500 templates available within SAP Build. The goal is to make it possible to not only build applications faster but also deploy them via a single click, said Schrötel.

    The company’s approach to building custom applications separates its core applications from code developed by others by running pristine instances of SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications in a separate cloud, known as the SAP digital core. A custom application is then deployed in a separate cloud and accesses SAP data via application programming interface (API). That approach enables SAP to update its ERP environment without worrying about breaking custom extensions.

    Of course, not every organization has transitioned to that model, so there are still plenty of instances of SAP software running in on-premises IT environments extended using code written in Java or the proprietary ABAP programming language. Over time, SAP is hoping that custom code will either be retired in favor of a process it has added to its ERP platform or by a more modern instance of that process running with a custom application deployed on a separate SAP cloud platform.

    SAP also has partnerships with providers of low-code platforms like Mendix and OutSystems that organizations can employ to build applications, but with the launch of SAP Build, the company is making a more concerted effort to encourage organizations to adopt the low-code platform it developed.

    While it’s not clear how eagerly low-code tools are embraced by citizen developers versus professional developers, the one thing that is certain is the pace of application development is accelerating. In many instances, professional developers are embracing low-code platforms as an alternative to procedural code to reduce expanding application development backlogs brought on by digital business transformation initiatives. In other instances, professional developers are employing low-code tools to collaborate more easily with end users as they build and deploy the applications that drive those processes.

    Regardless of the motivation, the impact this accelerated rate of application development will have on DevOps teams is profound. Not only do these applications have to be deployed in production environments, but DevOps teams must also secure and maintain a much larger application portfolio. As a result, the need to automate DevOps workflows will become more pronounced than it already is.

  • Low-Code/No-Code Options Key to Bringing Web3 Mainstream

    Low-Code/No-Code Options Key to Bringing Web3 Mainstream

    Driven by cryptocurrencies and NFTs, Web3 is one of the most talked about technology industry waves in the last several years. But even with all the money it’s generated and the media coverage received, Web3 hasn’t yet gained the mainstream acceptance that Web2 has achieved. One of the main reasons for this gap is that blockchain-based technology continues to be complex, requiring developers to learn new languages and development environments as well as gain expertise in concepts like cryptography, hashing, oracles, zero-knowledge proofs, proof of work, proof of stake and more. And even once users understand that they then need to figure out how these pieces all fit together. The required time and money investment has slowed adoption by developers—until now.  

    Web3 is finally coming into its own, thanks in part to the abstraction provided by SDKs and APIs. This technology is making it increasingly possible for all developers, not just Web3 developers, to participate and innovate on this new wave of technology disruption.

    If you look at many of the providers in Web3 like Infura (ConsenSys), NFT Port and OpenSea, for example, and their growth, there’s been a significant movement from these providers over the past couple of years from simply providing nodes for underlying blockchains to now offering higher-level APIs. This translates into developers and companies no longer having to set up their own nodes to provide SDKs and higher-level APIs that rely on data indexers and pre-audited smart contracts to simplify token minting and reading from blockchains. 

    With the evolution of APIs and SDKs, developers using these programs no longer have to learn the intricacies of creating contracts on different blockchains, multiple developer tools, syntax and languages nor must they possess a deep understanding of these different blockchains. Instead, developers can rely on APIs that abstract the underlying complexity, easing the burden for developers who need only pass parameters like chain for indexing, token or smart contract IDs and other general-purpose information. These APIs will evolve into providing more low-code/no-code offerings with larger graphical UI components that developers can simply drag-and-drop to extract value as well as create DApps that can also be retrofitted into their existing applications or app infrastructure. 

    This evolution will be similar to the way the cloud evolved; look at AWS’ and Azure’s infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) as a current example. Existing apps could be lifted and shifted onto the cloud. This led to platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings with APIs that were cloud-ready; with developers’ latency, security and scalability needs augmented by low-code or no-code offerings. This is also similar to Microsoft’s Power Platform which used drag-and-drop operations on many cloud components, allowing integration and extensibility of the Microsoft platform in a short amount of time. This spawned a new generation of ecosystem players as the bar to participate and innovate in the cloud lowered; now every type of developer, no matter what their area of expertise, can take advantage. This also meant that the new technology was accessible for all developers to solve business challenges more quickly while significantly decreasing time-to-market.  

    You can already see this parallel in the Web3 world. A lot of the key players building developer tools are starting to target the business and technical decision-makers. They are talking about how easy it would be for Web2 developers to leverage their high-level APIs and SDKs (something that Web2 developers understand extremely well) to use Web3 technology to solve new business challenges. And they can do so without setting up expensive innovation organizations and looking for scarce (and expensive) Web3 developers. The next step in this evolution would be to extend these APIs for NFTs, analytics, streaming, MEVs, estimating gas and more to have no-code, automatically generated components that finally allow more Web2 developers to transition to Web3 and, as a result, bring Web3 into the mainstream.

  • Despite Democratization, IT Department More Central Than Ever

    Despite Democratization, IT Department More Central Than Ever

    There’s been talk of the decentralization of IT within organizations for years, and events of recent years have certainly accelerated this trend. Yet, IT has never been more important to the success of the organization.

    According to ManageEngine’s newly released IT at Work: 2022 and Beyond study, an increasing number of IT-related decisions are being made outside of the formal IT department. Yet, the survey also found that just as non-IT employees and the lines of business take a larger role in choosing their technology stack, collaboration between IT and other areas of the business has actually increased, not decreased as many feared would occur.

    The survey found that 76% of North American decision-makers reported their organization encourages non-IT employees to develop their own applications using low-code/no-code platforms and most departments, most notably notable quality control (24%) and finance (21%), are independently turning to AI/ML solutions to perform their jobs.

    These findings echoed an earlier survey conducted by IDG for Snow Software. This survey found that 67% of respondents believed that at least half of their IT budget is controlled by their various business units and not the IT department. Interestingly, 78% agreed that this is a positive development for their organization and that it would ultimately enable their business to become more innovative and agile.

    That may be so, but many North American IT decision-makers responding to the ManageEngine survey (48%) also believed that a lack of training and basic technical knowledge (47%) are holding back their staff from taking full advantage of the technology available to them. Still, 76% of survey respondents reported that their staff is more technology-savvy today than they were before the pandemic.

    Those benefits aside, a full 99% of respondents said that their organization also faced challenges due to IT decentralization, most notably maintaining IT security (56%), overall quality maintenance (41%) and the reliability of ongoing support (37%).

    Paradoxically, despite the increased technology autonomy within organizations, the ManageEngine survey found that 82% of North American business and technology leaders agreed that collaboration between IT and other lines of business increased in the past two years. Further, 89% believed that the IT department’s success is directly linked with the general success of their organization.

    “Those enterprises that succeed here will be those that are able to not only have the right policies in place that encourage IT and line-of-business collaboration but the technology also in place that will identify applications and cloud services independently deployed by those line-of-business managers,” said Scott Crawford, an analyst with 451 Research, S&P Global Market Intelligence.

    It’s clear that the ease with which low-code/no-code platforms, cloud services and other cloud platforms made business technology accessible to non-IT decision-makers has decentralized and democratized IT decision-making. What’s interesting is that IT departments have found their relevance and importance within organizations increasing, and not decreasing as many feared. Those IT departments that have succeeded, and that will continue to succeed, are those that find themselves capable of supporting the technology decisions their various departments have made rather than centrally trying to control those decisions.

    The ManageEngine survey is based on the responses from 3,300 global IT and business decision-makers with 500 of those respondents residing in North America.

  • 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.