In the last 12 months or so of the pandemic, companies have launched applications on the fly just so they could continue operating: booking and tracking deliveries, contactless payments, online retail, and more. The world changed overnight, and management suddenly had to monitor COVID-19 symptoms, distribute medical equipment, and manage employee wellness remotely. Many of the apps that were released in the last year didn’t even exist in our imaginations, much less in app stores. Organizations could not afford to take years — even months — to develop these applications, not if they were determined to succeed in the harsh economic conditions. Low-code enabled them to build fast and iterate often.   

What is low-code?

Low-code is a software development approach that enables app delivery fast and with minimal hand-coding. Applications are built through visual development using modeling and a graphical interface. Because manual coding is no longer necessary, you can take apps to production and into the hands of your users much, much faster. Gartner forecasts that 65% of application development will leverage low-code by 2024. In about the same timeline, the low-code industry will triple in value. This is not a surprise since a 2018 Forrester study said that half of developers were already using or planning to incorporate low-code into their initiatives. The COVID-19 global crisis simply accelerated this earlier prediction.  

What’s in a low-code platform?

At the heart of a low-code platform is a drag-and-drop interface that your developers can use instead of writing a million lines of code. The forerunning and Gartner-recognized leader OutSystems has the following and more:

• Visual integrated development environment (IDE) where developers will visually define the user interface, workflows, and data models of the application. Only if necessary, hand-written code may be added here.
• Backend and services connectors that will automatically handle data structures, storage, and retrieval.
• Application lifecycle manager which are automated tools for building, debugging, deploying, and maintaining the application in test, staging, and production.

 

Why low-code?

Now that the world has truly become digital, users will accept nothing less than fast and convenient. The pressure on IT teams to innovate and deliver is greater. In the olden days, this could only be achieved by well-funded departments that had an army of developers in-house. A lean team had to manage user expectations and a development pipeline that they inherited from another team and the team before that. Low-code evens out the playing field. Now, development teams of any size can leverage the power of low code to increase developer productivity and speed. If you can imagine it, you can build it — fast.  The value of your developers increases too. Free from the burden of writing complex code, they can focus on creating a great brand experience through apps. They can continuously add new features, modules, and improvements without worrying about compatibility and maintenance issues. Your team will simply get more done.  

Don’t fall behind

In the video above, you can see how creating a dashboard takes only few clicks in OutSystems. If you are still hand-coding your apps today, you may be falling behind your competitors. They are launching MVPs in a matter of weeks. By the time you get yours deployed, they may already have captured the majority of the user base and are currently building their nth iteration.  Catch up! You too can arm your team with OutSystems, the leading low-code platform as recognized by Gartner. Book a demo with Stratpoint, an OutSystems Sales and Delivery Partner in the Philippines, by emailing hello@stratpoint.com.