How No-Code And Low-Code Tools Democratize Software Development And Create Business Value
By Sundeep Reddy Mallu
The COVID-19 crisis has created a need to quickly build new software applications to handle distressed customers, monitor employee health, support social distancing, build contract tracing apps, and many more. Alongside these needs, the business “wish list” of digital transformation products seems to be ever-growing. Here’s where no-code and low-code tools come in. These tools allow non-programmers, AKA ‘citizen developers,’ to create web or mobile applications without writing any (or very little) custom code. Shortly put, these platforms are digital lego blocks for software.
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No-code and low-code tool or platforms accelerate digital transformation in established enterprises by allowing business users or SMEs to build enterprise-ready applications. And for startups, MVPs can be made live with a quick turnaround time.
According to Gartner, low-code tools and application development will be responsible for more than 65% of application development activity by 2024.
While it might be tempting to think of these tools as a replacement for developers—and a potential solution to the programmer shortage—that’s not the case. There will always be a need for skilled programmers to complete the ideative and complex task of building new products. Rather than be replaced by no-code and low-code platforms, developers can use them to their advantage to democratize software development and drive business value. Here’s how.
No-Code and Low-Code Tools up the Speed Limit for Developers
No-code and low-code tools can help developers build 60-70% of an enterprise application, right off the bat, freeing up their time to focus on mission-critical activities. For example, no-code solutions have out-of-the-box modules to deploy authentication, data transformation, visual drill-downs, cache management, and reporting capabilities. By accessing these services out-of-the-box, developers are also less likely to make mistakes and will see fewer errors in the code.
Ultimately, developers are able to generate more functionality in less time than before. This means having the time to both addresses more pressing and challenging needs and also to work on projects which are more stimulating and creative.
No-Code Tools Allow Non-Technical People to Build Applications
No-code platforms allow business users or SMEs to build applications that meet their needs through a guide graphical user interface (GUI).
They don’t have to understand the underlying code that is created in order to build the application – saving developers’ on time that they’d usually spend on these applications. For example, rather than a developer building a sales reporting dashboard from scratch, a member of the sales team could use a no-code tool to quickly form the data pipeline, create standard metrics charts, and even generate data visualizations.
A new, innovative example of this is GTP-3, Open AI’s newest language model. GTP-3 is a series of autocomplete tools that have been trained on mammoth amounts of text data and can create human-like text and write code on demand. One example use case points to a tool can generate code from simple text demands. This takes the onus off developer teams of creating simple applications and allows them to dedicate themselves to the more complex and demanding tasks.