10/29/2022
Why is the No Code/Low Code the revolution that nobody is talking about?
Background
In IT, the last 40-odd years could be considered the age of automation. Most of the software written was to automate some processes. However, every piece of software was written from scratch. Often it would take years to develop, and the cost would run into millions of dollars. As a result, over this period organizations have spent trillions of dollars on building custom software. Very soon people understood that most of the things that these applications do are highly repetitive and can be largely done through either configuration or automatic code generation. So, starting in the late 90s many companies started investing in creating such tools. MS Access or Oracle DBFormBuilder came during that period. They were very basic and hence could not cater to all the user cases. Once the Internet came and organizations started shifting to the Web, standalone applications like MS Access went out of favor, replaced by the next generation of much more powerful tools. This undercurrent is highly underappreciated but is a tectonic shift for the IT industry. In this decade these tools will attain full maturity and will trigger massive job cuts in the traditional software companies dependent on custom software development. But like all advancements in technology, they will usher in new opportunities also and overall will be beneficial to both the businesses and the consumers.
Time to Market
In the movie "Margin Call'' when the CEO made the famous remark and I quote "It certainly is a hell of a lot easier to be first" he was not exaggerating. According to one study, the most important deciding factor to a successful business venture is not the people or technology, but it is the time to market. No Code/Low Code tool can speed up software development by a factor of 10. That's a significant edge over the competition. It allows for Rapid Prototyping that drastically cuts risk by bringing the various stakeholders to a consensus at the earliest stage. Post-production also, customers' change requests can be catered to much faster thus driving up customer retention.
Maintainability
Software created from no-code tools are far more maintainable than traditional software simply because there is no code to maintain! It cannot be any better than that. Moreover, all of this configuration is in the framework itself and not in some property files or XMLs floating around all over the place.
Open to Change, but Close to Modification
No-code framework obviously doesn't mean that customization is not possible. Most good frameworks allow injecting custom-code whenever needed that are not available out of the box. In addition, many have a very vibrant community of developers with an active marketplace so that what's not available can be bought and plugged into the framework from the marketplace. But the framework is protected from modification. That means change happens in a predictable way without posing any risk to the core functionality. This is very different from monolithic custom applications where nothing is protected. Deployment, what deployment?
Even with the advent of Dev Ops, No-code is still far ahead. The job of DevOps is to automate processes that deploy code on the servers. Since there is no code, so nothing to deploy and nothing to automate. No-code frameworks support creation of multiple environments natively. It's just a matter of single mouse click to promote an application from one environment to another.
One team, One code but Many Solutions
With the no-code framework, the only thing to maintain is the framework itself, either developed in-house or by a third party. The boilerplate code is need only to be written once but can be shared by all the different applications.
Good for the Business
Apart from saving time, and mitigating risk, the biggest benefit is that it saves money. If applications can be developed 10 times faster than it requires ten times less work by highly paid engineers. Not only that, no-code frameworks have lowered the barrier. Now a non-programmer also can develop beautiful apps with little or no programming knowledge. This will bring in new innovations.
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