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According to Gartner No-Code and Low-Code will deliver 50% of all software projects …
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. According to Gartner No-Code and Low-Code will deliver 50% of all software projects in the year 2021. Even if these numbers are inflated, you’d have to be living under a rock to avoid noticing it is gaining traction, and it is gaining traction very, very fast. Hence; What exactly is it? Will it steal your job? And why should you even care? First of all, there is a huge difference between No-Code and Low-Code. No-Code is typically targeting „citizens“, as in people not able to create software systems themselves due to lack of software development skills. No-Code is often referred to as „citizen development“ – Implying people without knowledge about programming language and software development theory can create software systems. No-Code is useful for simple customer facing frontends, with some interaction with pre-defined services, and simple database structures. However, we’re a far cry away from being able to deliver complex systems using No-Code, and I am not sure if we will ever reach that point either. Besides, even No-Coders requires low level modules and components to interact with, something typically accomplished by working together with a „real“ software developer, churning out these components such that the „citizen“ can orchestrate our components together. Low-Code on the other hand is targeting developers, and can be seen as an extension to the tools we are already using, making us more productive and helping us deliver superior quality. Low-Code typically requires some coding after the automated process is done doing its thing, and hence beyond what the average „citizen developer“ can use. For these reasons a lot of developers will answer you; „I don’t believe in No-Code. Sure Low-Code might have some value, but not No-Code.“ In such a regard, Low-Code is just an incremental improvement of our current development models, and one could argue that even things such as NuGet and NPM are its ancestors – Simply because if you have ever used a package repository to manage libraries, you’ve arguably already been using Low-Code for a long time. Low-Code is for your codebase similar to Unit Tests, since it automates a part of your existing process, to ensure higher quality, faster iterations, and better products for the end user. The same way Unit Testing have automated the way we test software, Low-Code inevitably will automate the way we create (parts of) our code. No-Code typically allows non-developers to use a GUI to drag and drop together functionality, visual components, and database connections – While Low-Code is typically using automated processes to read meta data from for instance your database, to generate code based upon your existing components, and/or data structure.
