DEVOPSdigest

Before the pandemic, Gartner predicted(link is external) that by 2024, low-code development would be responsible for more than 65% of application development. With workers distributed and organizations now reliant on digital, this trend looks set to accelerate.

As organizations look to boost their digital agility, low-code solutions make it easy for business users to develop automated solutions without a programming or coding background. This is transforming productivity and removing the pressure on businesses to find enough scarce and expensive developers to build software. Rather than creating an application from scratch, low-code enables services and data to be combined to create custom applications. This ease of use is fueling the rise of citizen developers who can rapidly and cost-effectively develop apps. By harnessing business users, this significantly expands the number of people who can power digital transformation and ensures that the solutions are tailored to the needs of users.

The low-code movement is revolutionizing software development and is being used to automate and streamline processes across the board. There is no doubt about the productivity gains delivered by the ability of domain experts to customize applications, but it's creating concerns around the quality of the software.

For example, the flexibility provided by low-code platforms can create issues as it can lead to fragmentation resulting in file formats no longer working. Therefore, organizations need rules that define what users can customize and what they can't. Otherwise, you could end up with a situation where critical applications are unusable

Enterprises must also ensure that their strategy for testing and maintaining software supports the low-code environment. If not, organizations will rapidly create apps that then face a bottleneck at the testing and maintenance phase. For businesses looking to shift more development to low-code platforms, they need to modernize their test and maintenance strategies to support this new agile environment. In the low-code world, manual testing has no role to play.

Deploying a test automation tool is critical to keep up with the pace of software creation and to allow low-code development to scale within the organization. In addition, quality needs to be evaluated at the user experience level, not code compliance. Making sure that the low-code developers have access to automation tools they can deploy is integral to delivering on the citizen developer trend.

Delivering speed and agility at scale has never been more critical and enterprises will continue to embrace low-code platforms. If organizations don't adapt and modernize their testing strategies, they will become the Achilles heel of citizen developers and the low-code movement.