According to a recent CIO article, one of the most influential analysts in the software industry projected that the low-code development market will reach a stunning $21.2 billion by 2022 with a compound annual growth rate of 40%. The big question is: are the analysts wrong? Breakdown of low code development slow adoption
- Slow learning curve. Someone once told that 'Time Equals Money'. The "citizen developer" inside a corporate office should constantly be busy fulfilling the tasks for which he was hired. Adopting a new trend inside the company can prove to be exciting (new term, same thing), but eventually, every employee will notice that learning to use a new app inside a corporate office is usually a sluggish process, resource-intensive and costly. Whether it’s a new app or a new workflow interface, learning takes mental effort. Users can get fatigued easily, and, following the law of inertia, they tend to stick to what they already know.
- Brassbound User Experience. Once you register for access to a low-code software development platform, you will be flooded with tens of emails thanking you for choosing this path and inviting you to be an important part of this trend. You will also be prompted to follow a 'quick' 160 hours (free) tutorial that will guide your journey into your first custom app and further useless information. WYSIWYG a.k.a 'drag and drop' experience is then completed once you are asked to download [...] a studio app. Sounds familiar? This is the moment when we celebrate the graduation of '95 developers. As a comparison, imagine that in 2019 you are trying to read the news on your phone, however, the author asks you to download an app in order to access the content. Would you do it? As Bob Reselman clearly described the attempt of removing 'code from coding' with 4GL, I wouldn't be surprised if marketing gurus will soon take advantage of the old 5GL term, and reinvent it as something innovative and future-of-software-development worthy. Taking advantage of the generational gap can pay the bill, in the end.
- The real value of Low-Code Platforms outcome. Once you have completed your first low-code app in any of the existing platforms, you soon realize the amount of effort (mental and physical) that you've invested for essentially resolving simple tasks like importing a file or adding a button. Should you continue to have the nerves, you'll finally commit the v10 and you'll then move forward to your initial beta testers. I must say, I admire people who are brave enough to ask inexperienced employees to test various workflows, actions, and UX after being accustomed to the old and trustworthy Excel.
- Post-release Enterprise-Wide Operations and App-Maintenance. Yes, now it's time to explain everybody in Accounting how to use your newly developed Company Payroll application. You'll first need to invest some time and resources into documents, videos - essentially how-to's in order to minimize your possible number of midnight incident calls from overseas. Second, you'll need to organize face-2-face meetings with every employee that has additional questions about the app and furthermore, discovers that his feature request was not implemented at all.
To summarize, I have presented a brief version of the operational burden that software migration usually implies. Low-code software development platforms need to demonstrate better UX, stability, low migration costs, and full-dedicated support for helping customers.
Early Education Programs - The Unique Chance for Future of Software Development.
Yes, we do have an idea about what the future holds for us in terms of software development: software to build software; but there's more to this than meets the eye: we're talking about containerization and serverless micro-services, AI-first software development, embedded software security testing, increased third-party API integrations, edge computing for data processing, block-chain technology, and others. To stand a chance we need global mindset experts, courageous self-starters instead of generalists and task executioners.
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