Helping out a friend, I had reason to revisit low-code/no-code solutions and poke around a bit. The industry has been relatively quiet on the topic, but changes in systems and marketing made me feel the need to offer an update on the relation of current solutions to DevOps.
Low-code/no-code solutions have been a panacea in the eyes of some both in and outside the industry for decades. 4GLs were the earliest widespread attempt to make an environment that eliminated the need for developers, and while some years are quieter than others, the movement has not slackened.
There are even some things we should consider adjuncts to low-code/no-code environments that normally are not considered. Traditionally the drive for low-code/no-code solutions is to move faster than IT normally turns out solutions. This would force us to consider the spreadsheet in accounting with 50,000 lines of special functions as a companion solution—faster than waiting for IT and more agile.
The thing is that low-code/no-code environments have increasingly realized that IT is going to be their best customer, adjusting their offerings to focus more in that direction. At the same time, agile development and DevOps have made low-code/no-code solutions more palatable to an IT shop that is looking to continue the gains brought about by these technologies.
The future appears to trend toward low-code/no-code solutions being an adjunct of agile and DevOps. I don’t say this lightly, but the signs do seem to point that way. Agile shops, having become more responsive to business needs, will hit a limit on what they can deliver, while the appetite for faster and more responsive systems delivery will not abate. Low-code environments that offer the following will become a very real option to extending the gains of agile and DevOps:
- A clear and understandable way to code when needed in the language of choice for the IT environment.
- A high level of feedback on what is wrong, possibly including suggestions on how to fix it.
- Transparency in what is actually happening behind the scenes with the “no-code” part of the system.
The idea is simple. By handling tasks that we, as developers, do over and over and over, we are freed to spend more time doing the truly innovative and environment specific work. This would seem to offer the next step in the growth of agile.
Those tools that offer options such as automated deployment will step into ARA land also, making the Ops side of DevOps happy—in shops that haven’t invested a fortune in setting up ARA already, anyway. If low-code can offer the ability to say, “Here is a problem,” then the developer can submit a fix, and it is submitted to test, and if tests pass is sent to production (and some of the tools do), then the only questions are, “Does the code generated by the low-code part perform? and, Is it easy to integrate existing libraries, etc.?” If the answers are yes, then we also have an add-on for DevOps that delivers value.
We live in interesting times. It will be very cool to see this all play out, and interesting to see where it heads after this. At least one vendor is betting on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to offer increased productivity.
Of course, it isn’t a panacea. I read where a vendor said, “We automatically update your queries when a table is modified,” which spawns another dozen questions for me, starting with “Really? What do you do about code that was counting on that field much later in processing? Do you check that screens are displaying defaults, or that variables used to make decisions aren’t always the default value? Do you flag this stuff so devs can ‘fix’ what automated query changes ‘broke’?” I’ll be digging in some more, because now they’ve got my attention. So you’ll probably be hearing more from me about this topic.
Meanwhile, let the future worry about the future, and keep kicking it today. Just stay aware of what else is going on out there that might be handy in your toolbox.
