What does a modern application development platform really look like?
Paid Feature How do you imagine the ideal software development process? Is it a virtuous circle, with products and features moving swiftly from ideation to production with feedback built in, leading to constant improvement? The reality for many organizations is more like a vicious circle. Two years of pandemic-induced disruption has only reinforced the importance of multi-experience and customer journeys when it comes to attracting, onboarding and retaining customers. But this has piled pressure on development teams to speed up the delivery of products and features – while ensuring customers don’t fall between the cracks moving from one platform to another. At the same time, organizations are trapped in a bruising battle for developer talent. CompTIA figures showed US tech employment listings hitting 360,065 in October, a jump of 76,000 on the previous month, with almost a third of those vacancies being for software developers. In the UK, research by recruitment firm Robert Walters showed a 130 per cent rise in development vacancies [PDF] in the first half of 2021. This, anecdotally at least, is translating into surging salaries and accelerating staff turnover. And whenever you lose a developer, that vicious circle pulls just a little tighter and nastier. Making matters more complicated, those sought after, expensive, and highly trained developers are often required to work in an almost handicraft way, as OutSystems director of analyst and customer research, Nuno Borges, explains. The pressure to deliver means in-house teams often make mistakes or shortcuts. In their hunt for talent, companies may turn to contractors or specialist firms. But this creates further problems, as they will have their own preferred methodologies and tool sets. As Borges says, “the IT industry has become very professional at creating gurus in particular technologies.” But when they move on, their preferences are hardwired into your systems. The problem proliferates, he continues, as companies look to work across more channels, more quickly. That bit of hand-tooled code in the website portal becomes an even bigger problem when you need to replicate the functionality in your mobile app. And so, technical debt insidiously clogs up the IT systems, choking innovation, and forcing highly skilled software engineers to spend more of their time on maintenance and less on innovation. It’s no surprise then, that low-code and no-code platforms have surged in popularity. The broad low-code market is predicted to grow 23 percent in 2021, Gartner has predicted, while Low-Code Application Platforms (LCAP) in particular will grow 30 per cent this year to $5.8bn. One of the promises of low and no-code, is the ability to create “citizen” developers, from the business rather than tech. After all, they understand the “business” and the problems it needs to solve better than anyone. Or so the logic goes. But it’s one thing giving a neophyte the tools to automate a repetitive process or accelerate their own personal productivity tasks. It’s quite another to ask them to create, say, apps in a highly regulated banking environment AND ensure they are GDPR compliant, AND ensure they’re cognizant of the data regulations wherever that app may be used. Now let’s throw nuances of the mainframe and ERP systems at the backend user experience considerations into the mix. According to Borges, this is why it’s important to distinguish between a no-code and low-code platform, and a full-featured modern application development platform, which is specifically designed to help enterprise developers do their job faster and better.
