What Is Low-Code?

With digital technology driving everything from how a company operates to the products and services it sells, companies across industries as diverse as retail, manufacturing, and banking need to master the skills and capabilities specific to their industry and excel at software development. Yes, software development has become a competitive differentiator.

A McKinsey study (Developer Velocity: How software excellence fuels business performance) created a metric called the Developer Velocity Index (DVI), which revealed data showing the value of organizations being good at software development.

Organizations in the top quartile saw revenue grow between 2014 and 2018 at a rate four to five times faster than companies in the bottom quartile. Top-quartile companies also had 60% higher total returns to shareholders and 20% better operating margins.

What’s more, top-quartile companies proved to be more innovative, scoring 55% higher in innovation than bottom-quartile companies. With the pandemic and the digital acceleration it brought about, these figures may have risen even further.

Today, it is clear that in most sectors of the economy, organizations that can deliver a competitive product with an excellent digital experience survive and, in many cases, thrive, while competitors that cannot do so perform worse or simply go bankrupt.

At the heart of this entire digital transformation is software, and an understanding of its importance, so that companies can be resilient and adapt to the changes inherent in how people work, live, shop, and experience products and services.

This is clearly a call to action to strategically review how organizations are positioned to develop software solutions that digitize offerings around the user experience.

The software industry has changed considerably over the past decade in three significant ways:

- Integrated into the business: Software is driving change and reinventing how traditional industries such as financial services and retail operate. Undeniably, most successful modern companies, such as Tesla, Amazon, Nubank, iFood, and Magalu, are examples of businesses where software is at the core and has fundamentally changed the user experience.

- Speed: The pace at which new software and features need to be brought to market has accelerated at an unimaginable rate. Gone are the days when an organization could wait years or months for a new program, when old methodologies such as “waterfall” prevailed. Today, new systems need to be implemented in weeks or days using “agile” software development models.

- Cost: The effort required to develop software has decreased dramatically as new technologies and models such as open source, cloud computing, and low-code have come into use.

One trend with the potential to significantly change the software development landscape is the model known as the “no-code/low-code” era. This is because low-code is expected to account for more than 70% of app development by 2025.

Many of the world’s largest technology companies already have solutions ready to deploy, and investors are putting millions of dollars into startups in the sector.

A low-code development platform (LCDP) is software that provides the environment developers use to create application software through intuitive, easy-to-use graphical interfaces, rather than traditional programming.

Adoption of and interest in low-code platforms are growing rapidly because demand for more and more software is increasing exponentially, while organizations need to expand their digital capabilities without relying on more programmers being available. Low-code platforms make it possible to build software in less time and reduce the time spent on programming.

The technology is relatively easy to adopt because it does not require an in-depth understanding of programming languages, since the coding itself becomes a marginal part of the development process.

Because development using low-code platforms is much faster, it encourages a more agile approach. Development can therefore grow incrementally and iteratively, allowing end users to see and shape the solution as it evolves, helping ensure that it is well aligned with their needs.

Low-code solutions equip citizen developers, employees without professional programming experience, with visual building blocks to create departmental and functional applications on their own, while still working under IT administration and control.

At the same time, low-code empowers professional developers to create, customize, and iterate on applications that enhance their organizations’ most important operations and interactions. This is an interesting point: developers will not disappear, but they will stop doing repetitive, monotonous work.

Professional developers will become more valuable because they will be able to focus on solving more interesting challenges and tackle needs that require more sophisticated solutions. The result is that organizations using developers and low-code tools will be more efficient than those using developers alone.

Low-code solutions also bridge the gap between professionals with business domain expertise and specialized developers, enabling cross-functional teams to communicate and work together throughout the development process to ensure that applications deliver the intended results.

However, the low-code/no-code movement is still not fully understood. There is still a lack of awareness and confusion among companies and vendors. Even the terms low-code and No-code themselves are misleading, because the difference is not about whether people need to code. The distinction is more about the types of people who use these platforms to architect applications.

No-code is for “citizen developers”, business users who can create functional applications, but ones that are generally limited in scope and functionality, without having to write a single line of code. Low-code, on the other hand, focuses on professional developers, streamlining and simplifying their work by delivering enterprise-grade applications with little or no manual coding.

Focusing on personas rather than coding provides a more appropriate frame of reference. We do not need to choose between no-code and low-code. Innovation can come from citizen developers, but after that initial start, developers can take over, refine, and expand on the work.

There are still some barriers to overcome. One is the evolution and maturation of low-code/no-code technologies, but the other, and more challenging, is the obstacle posed by current mental models that shape the system development paradigm.

Just as advances in technology and AI in medicine generate unfounded fears that machines will replace doctors, when they will not, but will take robotic tasks off their hands and make medicine more human, low-code/no-code technologies also create concerns among current system development professionals and software development consulting firms.

If we take a business application built the traditional way, which might require, say, six months, a dozen developers, and two million reais to build and deploy, and reduce those figures to two weeks, three people, and one hundred thousand reais, while ending up with an application that is potentially faster, higher quality, and more flexible to get started, who loses out?

The use of low-code and no-code platforms will require new IT governance models in companies. Just as organizations previously brought development and operations together to create the DevOps model, low-code/no-code will require a step forward, bringing business areas into the picture and establishing new management models.

Most organizations are on a journey to become digital. By democratizing and speeding up application development, low-code approaches can help them move faster. Amid rapid change and great uncertainty, this is a benefit that cannot and should not be overlooked.