Rise of Citizen Developers

According to IDC, there will be a need to deploy over 500 million digital applications by 2023 – the same number of apps built in the last 50 years.

Businesses these days, irrespective of their industry or location, are going through some or the other form of digital transformation based on their specific need and digital maturity. In today’s world of accelerated turnaround times and results, most businesses and enterprises rely on many software products and applications.

Naturally, the demand for software developers has also skyrocketed. The US Bureau of Labor predicts that in the US alone, around 1.4 million IT jobs are set to be available by 2022. However, only 4,00,000 graduates are available to fill the roles.

This acute lack of skilled coders has led to the rise of “citizen developers”. Other factors which also heavily contributed to this are – overburdened IT departments, the need for businesses to cut costs, and technology innovations that result in lower dependency on human efforts to develop applications. Essentially, citizen developers are empowered business users who can use user-friendly platforms to create new or change existing business applications without involving IT departments.

These user-friendly platforms are low code platforms. Leveraging these, even the non-technical staff can create software applications using the GUI of these platforms with little or even no programming. Let’s take a deeper dive into the concept.

Challenges of Low-code Development

With every benefit, there comes a challenge. The same goes with low-code platforms too. Here are some challenges of using low-code platforms.

1. Expertise Requirements – Though low code platforms are designed to facilitate non-experts/business users, sometimes it still requires a level of development knowledge, at least to understand the pre-written code while building every aspect of an application.
2. Limited Integrations – Low code can be integrated with a vast expanse of systems. However, it is not compatible with more complex software which utilizes external databases or multiple backends.
3. Security Vulnerabilities – Low-code offers full control to neither the source code nor the data. It makes it impossible to determine the potential vulnerabilities in your apps. As a result, organizations may stick with traditional coding for sensitive applications until further security innovations are made in this direction.

How is Low-code different from no-code?

Both have the same goal – enabling users with little to no knowledge of coding to build and customize applications based on their business needs.

By stripping away the operating costs associated with setting up environments and infrastructure maintenance, both low and no-code development platforms help pro and amateur developers improve productivity. Instead of requiring a developer to know traditional programming languages, they both provide a visual approach to application development. However, that’s pretty much where the similarities end.

What is No-Code?

Who Can Use the No-Code Platforms?

• Large Enterprises: where the IT teams don’t have the capacity to create applications at scale for their fast-growing needs.
• Non-coders: to create a prototype of the idea before handing it over to the IT team to develop.
• Startups: which can’t afford to bring in skilled developers.

Differences Between Low-code and No-code

Top 5 low code application platforms for business developers

Let’s explore some of the best low-code platforms that can be the right fit for your business.

Features:

• Helps you connect and integrate with 220+ data sources not only across Microsoft but also other third-party systems.
• Prebuilt templates, simple drag and drop functionalities, prebuilt AI components help you create interactive web and mobile apps.
• Allows you to customize both Office 365 and Dynamics 365.

Conclusion

Although low-code may not be a solution to all the challenges that traditional programming poses, but it is proving to be a formidable source of innovation.

The low code application platforms will continue to evolve and expand their integration ecosystems. Going forward, we can also expect some useful additions and upgrades to these platforms, which can have a deep impact on the software development space.

Until then, it can be assumed that the pace, agility, and accessibility of these low-code applications will be transformative for startups and large enterprises struggling with a lack of skilled development resources.