What’s DevOps? It’s a collection of practices that integrate software development (Dev) with IT operations (Ops). Its core objective is to reduce the life cycle of system development while offering a consistent delivery of high-quality software. Today, the DevOps industry is shifting its center of attention to finding a solution to a paramount problem: facilitating software developers to unveil while fulfilling the forecasted dreams for quality. That is, building helpful things swiftly with minimal flaws. The industry has been faced with this tension for some time until 2020 came to add another problem of working remotely and fastened digital transformation the existing interference created by the cloud, Software as a service (SaaS), and DevOps.
In the future, we would require a road map that calls for the improvement of test automation by offering quality engineering, a specialty that combines all the best practices and data-powered testing into end-to-end customer satisfaction and fueling organizational development.
What’s Low-Code Development?
The term Low-Code Development is generally used to refer to solutions to process development, development tools for software, and low-code application development among others. Low-code development solutions offer the infrastructure for IT users to put together applications and workflows. The infrastructure assists in abstracting away the code beyond commands enabling the IT specialists to configure business applications and workflows with minimal hand-coding.
What’s DevOps?
DevOps is all about automating the agile methodology. It’s aimed at empowering coders/developers to react to the requirements of enterprises in the future. Simply, it’s meant to eliminate latency in software development that has been in existence for a year. Today, automation via DevOps is metamorphosing to cloud-centric. Some public and private cloud service providers are supporting DevOps on their platforms by consistently integrating development tools. The tight integration reduces the expenses related to the automation of on-premises by DevOps while providing centralized management for reliable DevOps processes.
The majority of coders engaging in this process find management as a powerful instrument that keeps problems away and makes it easy to govern it centrally through the cloud. Additionally, cloud-powered DevOps eliminates the demand for accountability of the resources leveraged. Instead, the clouds leverage application-enabled accounting that accounts for the use of all resources by either the user, data, coder, or application. Conventional systems do not offer the service. When exhausting cloud-powered resources, it is easy to account for costs meant for development resources, and adjust where necessary. Interestingly, the cloud isn’t particularly running DevOps, it’s the DevOps that is actually driving the growth of the cloud.
How is Low-Code Development important?
The last two decades have witnessed skyrocketing regarding the equipment and technologies adopted by organizations. Consequently, the majority of IT departments aren’t running homogeneous stacks, instead, they are managing diverse and complex environments. These environments are evolving and so is IT. In those early days, the IT department could rely solely on highly specialized staff, regarded as the DBAs who understood AS/400 in and out, someone who could explain the COBOL like saying a native language, and that stuff. Where the ETL process was required to transmit data to COGNOS, then a person would be required to script all that.
In today’s state of technology, we cannot rely on the custom script as they are no longer matching the rates and abilities required to run our businesses. Additionally, the IT industry is facing an acute shortage of experienced developers in end-to-end processes. Here, the benefit of embracing low-code development comes in: it assists IT departments to effectively assemble new processes and create apps with minimal research, writing, and testing of new scripts. Also, it’s not a requirement for the IT specialists to possess specialized knowledge of all the tools or technologies involved in a collection of processes as the code will be abstracted away. Thus with an appropriate Low-Code tool, any IT specialist can generate a reliable, cross-platform business process while accelerating the delivery of the application.
What are the benefits of Low-Code Development?
Low-Code development is an umbrella term that covers a variety of tools adopted for the development of IT processes and commercial software. Most importantly, all these platforms under Low-code development possess common features like workflow testing and prototyping capabilities, drag-and-drop workflow designs, as well as direct integration. Based on the type of platform, these tools can be involved in the management of resources, monitoring, and streamlining of DevOps.
Now, where the business requires to leverage an application development policy/platform or an extensive solution for amalgamation of enterprise process, these tools under low-code development present numerous benefits such as:
- Increases productivity: Through automation and streamlined development processes, more is accomplished in less time. Also, low-code tools untangle the life cycle of processes. For instance, these tools can monitor processes and alert you in case of risk of failure. Also, the tools can assist in eliminating bottlenecks and unnecessary delays in processes. The platforms can be used to implement remediation workflows while reducing time spent on unproductive tasks.
- Shrunk OpEx/CapEx: Ordinarily, it’s easier and faster to purchase software than to develop an in-house solution. With Low-Code Development, this dynamic is altered. Rather than buying tools to configure SAP tasks, a low-code platform can be applied to swiftly build the required processes. Additionally, rather than consuming much time studying, compiling, and testing scripts, the processes can be assembled in a short time and with few resources.
- Great business agility: The majority of low-code facilities are pliable, offering direct integration with main vendors and allowing IT departments to convert APIs, commands, and internet services into essential reusable infrastructure. That way, the time spent in integrating and leveraging new equipment and technologies is cut down and this assists enterprises to precede in terms of consumer needs and market trends.
- Brisk iterations: To meet consumer needs, enterprises require quick evolution and Low-code platforms offer tools to assist developers in iterating and editing the existing processes. Some examples include the introduction of changes in jobs, documentation, or presentation of revision histories.
- Little reliance on Shadow IT: The majority of enterprises have one feature in common – executing and running software without approval by IT specialists – just to save time. Luckily, a Low-code development tool enables rapid deployment of applications and processes and immensely minimizes the requirement for shadow IT. Also, using intuitive user interfaces, business owners are allowed to implement and run processes.
- Little time for automation: The combination of Low-code platforms and DevOp tools accelerates the formulation of automating tasks as well as end-to-end processes. Depending on particular business occasions and IT, workflows can be easily initiated, new processes can be formulated by using variables to control data across the platforms. The pre-designed integrations allow for the virtual automation of digital business processes.
- Improves quality engineering (QE): low-code testing has countless benefits in the discipline of quality engineering, specifically switching from manual to automated testing. Whereas conventionally the process would have many hurdles, low-code testing comes to streamline it. It’s predicted that in a few years, there would be massive improvements in automation and these will focus immense efforts on IT operations to support continuous engineering. Teams dealing with manual testing will benefit from this transition and would most probably prompt talent alterations and elongated procedures of pilot projects. Arguably, low-code development holds the key to up-skilling employees, making transitions, and ensuring quality.
Low-Code is not meant to substitute scripts – unless someone wants to accomplish that. The majority of IT companies own script libraries that they have toiled to come up with. Besides, these scripts are very effective, efficient, reliable, and there is no way they should abandon them. In such a case, Low-Code platforms are used for securing and improving the existing scripts. Some solutions built for low-code development rely on script language and this allows IT to design scripts for end-to-end processes with no extra coding. Also, there is the issue of script vaulting that offers a central point from where scripts are stored, managed, and secured. We can contract resources like audit trails, changesets, auto-documentation, and revision histories to offer protection and improvements to these scripts.
How is the future with Low-code?
Today, businesses are swiftly embracing new technologies to adapt to speedily alternating markets and anticipations around the consumer experience. At the same time, business leaders are ramming for the development of digital transformation strategies capacitated with the provision of instantaneous data to consumers. In response to consumer demands, automation solutions are adopting low-code technology and machine learning.
Now, the thing is; DevOps presents as many challenges as opportunities that call for innovations to match them. Low-Code development technologies bring genuine effective tools at the fingertips in all manner of resources to varied players in the industry: manual testers, automation engineers, code developers, product designers, as well as customer support. All the roles are needed in the bid to formulate specialized programming skills.
That said, the IT world is becoming more complex than ever and there is an immense need to abstract as much integration as possible. As a result, the Low-Code market is expected to hit USD 21 billion by next year. On the same note, three-quarters of large businesses are expected to adopt at least four low-code tools.
Happy testing 🚀
Rithesh Raghavan from Acodez