Low-code Weekly (11.28.2022)

Highlights from this week in low-code:

• Coding is just one approach to programming. If the goal is to build software, then high-code, low-code, and no-code are all valuable tools in an organization's tool belt
• Developers who use low-code tools are more likely to stick to a 40 hour work week, and so more likely to be retained rather than become burnt out.
• Supply chain resilience cannot be achieved amidst our current developer shortage. Low-code tools represent a an important solution.
• Expectation-setting is vital to the long-term success of citizen development programs.
• Professional developers and citizen developers consume information differently. Where a more systematic approach may be best for professionals, a 'knowledge nugget' approach to training may be more effective for citizen developers.

Opinion

• Coding is Dead, Long Live Programming! ( Anirudh VK , Analytics India Magazine). “Coding is not the main event anymore. Building software is the main event. Coding is just one small part of it. We think the future of coding is no coding at all.”
• Low-Code Tools Improve Devs' Work-Life Balance, Survey Finds (The New Stack). Of those developers surveyed who reported using low-code tools in their jobs, 71% said they are able to stick to a 40-hour work week. By contrast, only 44% of devs whose organizations don’t use low code said the same.
• Creating Supply Chain Resilience Amid A Serious Developer Shortage ( Vaidya Aiyer , VARInsights). The pandemic, the recession, and the Great Resignation may constitute a series of crises, but when the dust clears, companies could find themselves with more efficient and resilient supply chains. These next-gen development techniques can empower organizations to innovate and operate at the speed of business.
• Key to Citizen Developer Success: Set Everyone's Expectations Properly ( Howard M. Cohen , ADT Magazine). Understanding and effectively communicating expectations with citizen developers is vital to any program’s success. Something that I especially appreciate about this piece is the author’s discussion of the opportunity that sanctioned low-code platforms represent for transforming ‘shadow IT’ for good: “One of the side benefits of adopting low-code/no-code is that it can help eliminate Shadow IT. Identify your renegades and offer them training on a low-code platform. Commit to pairing them with developers who can assure quality and conformity, while also smoothing any rough edges in the application. This is great for the departmental managers; it helps them feel well supported. It’s also great for the developers, because their workload has been cut by whatever the citizen developers' departmental managers can provide.”
• The long-expected rise of citizen developers ( Suresh Sambandam , Business World). With the proper work platform, IT leaders can still stay in control and be responsible for the overall security and functioning of the tech landscape. The IT team can approve dozens of new apps per month rather than just building a few on their own.
• The future of IT: decentralization and collaboration ( Vijay Sundaram , The Enterprisers Project). Nearly three-quarters of IT decision-makers in North America report that their organization has successfully decentralized its IT structure. These same folks, however, say that their organization faces challenges if it continues to decentralize. Thus, most IT decision-makers believe that the push for a decentralized IT department is rather precarious and that the answer lies in creating a hybrid (distributed, part-centralized) IT entity – one that collaborates well with all the other departments.
• Examining low-code/no-code popularity across Africa and its range of disruption for CIOs ( Aurore Bonny , CIO). Some West African countries, such as Benin, understand that low-code/no-code tools are innovative and disruptive to the CIO community, but not universally trusted.
• Is There a Difference Between Citizen Developers and Subject Matter Experts? ( 𝗣𝗵𝗶𝗹 𝗦𝗶𝗺𝗼𝗻 ). Plenty of subject matter experts don’t want to get their hands dirty—and that’s fine. The low-code/no-code po-po won’t come knocking on their door.

Research

Citizen vs Professional Developers: Differences and Similarities of Skills and Training for Low Code Development Platforms (15th annual International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation)

R. Bernsteiner, S. Schlögl, C. Ploder, T. Dilger, F. Brecher

Small sample size (n=12) so grain of salt and all that. Provisional findings, however, are provocative:

• citizen and professional developers have different learning needs
• citizen developers are likely to benefit from a ‘knowledge nugget’ approach rather than from more formal curricula
• existing training for professional developers can, in many cases, be adapted for citizen developer consumption

Potential issue with the study (aside from small sample size): unclear how ‘citizen developer’ is defined here. Knowledge nuggets may be fine for the sporadic CD, but for dedicated citizen developers building enterprise apps within a department, a more formal approach may still be the best approach

What about the usability in low-code platforms? A systematic literature review (Journal of Computer Languages)

Daniel Pinho, Ademar Aguiar, Vasco Amaral

Highlights based on the abstract.

• No proper definition of low-code development was found

• Researchers are performing usability studies on their proposed implementations, but more and broader research is required in order to truly progress the field

Microservices, a Step from the Low-Code to the No-Code (International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Systems and Informatics)

Mehdi AIT Said, Abdellah Ezzati & Sara Arezki

The authors propose a new approach to integrate the Microservice Architecture with the new movement of the No-Code/Low-Code development to produce a platform that allows developers and other people who are not software developers to build, test, and deploy applications easily and quickly. They saw promising results up to 91.21% of hand-coding optimization by a new Domain-Specific Language, which are explained in detail by a case study.