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July 2, 2019The business advantages of no-code application development? Time-efficiency, cost reduction, an all-in-one solution; a few examples how creating your business-critical software with no-code development platform WEM results in business value. Our partner, Zero Code Solutions lays out 6 benefits of no-code app development.
1. Focus on the core of the app with no-code
With no-code application development platform gives you the time to truly understand your customer’s needs so you can build something they love. In other words, focus on the core of an application.
With traditional or even modern DevOps development a lot of focus goes into the complexities of modern web and mobile application development. Evaluating the right UI frameworks to use for the front end can be a challenge as there is so much choice out there. It is also unclear which framework is best, just ask 10 developers and you probably get 10 different answers! Next, your full stack team needs to cut complex code logic and build data models, understand the best database technologies to use for your app, and the list keeps going…
No-code development platforms abstract a lot of the complexities in building the front-end user interface by providing rich templates to leverage and customise. You just don’t need to build UI/UX from scratch, and with the time you save you can spend more quality time with your users building a great application experience.
These platforms also provide you with a visual way of building logic in your apps which hugely speeds up the development process as your developers don’t need to drown in thousands of lines of code. They are also given a robust database which allows them to easily build even the most complex data models.
All this means that you can spend more time talking to the business; talking to more stakeholders to ensure you understand exactly what outcomes the business want. This results in guaranteed success with better customer feedback from your users.
2. Reduce the cost of development by up to 80%
It’s no secret that building custom applications with traditional and DevOps methods is costly. You need to hire scarce specialised resources all the way up the stack. To build your app you may need to hire front-end and back-end developers, business analysts, security consultants, infrastructure and/or cloud specialists.
No-code application development abstracts the complexities of front-end and back-end development. You can use a single front-end or back-end developer to build the complete stack. They can build quicker as they don’t have to create all that code from scratch. Because you are building on a platform, you don’t have to worry about underlying infrastructure like servers, instances, containers, databases and then securing them. Simplification enables you to more effectively leverage your developers across the stack reducing the time to build, as well as the staff numbers you need. Less time and fewer people means less cost.
Reducing costs, of course, means “opportunity”. What the customer saves now can be re-invested into building more features and refining the user experience. Start delivering now what your customer would have otherwise left for later in a backlog or future road map!
3. Get your apps live 10 times faster with no-code
Developing custom applications is a complex undertaking as you are building from scratch. The complexity of writing code, building CI/CD pipelines and building infrastructure slows you down if you don’t have a lot of very experienced expert-level resources.
Another variable with complexity is spending the time to find the right people with the right skills. Sometimes the scarcity of these resources means you hire resources which don’t do the job to the quality you would have liked and all this results in lost time.
With a no-code application development platform, you have the opportunity to jump right into building. The learning curve is nowhere near as steep and is pretty simple for a developer of any level. Starting with the developers you already have or even citizen developers avoids those startup delays.
The simplicity of no-code development means your developers get more done in less time. We have found that we can easily deliver simple to complex applications in half the time, and in most cases, even quicker. Talk about a real game-changer!
4. Simplify the complexities of releasing your app in production
One of the most frustrating aspects of developing applications is release lifecycle management. To do this effectively you need to maintain multiple environments. Depending on the size of your company, the complexity of the application and development standards that you follow, you can have anything from two to six environments. This segregation increases complexity but also helps you to release updates to your application stack in a safe way (i.e. dev, test, pre-production, and production).
Keeping the code base, the data, as well as the underlying infrastructure in sync, is a lot of work. Even when you use DevOps practices and CI/CD tool sets it still introduces a lot of complexity. The result is that it takes a lot of time and effort to release changes to your app. Avoiding mistakes, rollbacks and unintended issues is also hard.
Our no-code application development platform provides developers with consistent environments to build, test and release applications. The underlying infrastructure, the data models, the workflows with logic, the environment variables are all completely consistent and relevant to their environment.
This means developers don’t need to worry about environment inconsistencies, code and configuration drift which dramatically improves the success rate of releases.
5. An all-in-one platform covers the underlying infrastructure
Building applications is what developers love to do, what they tolerate is the underlying infrastructure. The plumbing is just not as interesting; it is a necessity rather than a feature, and hence is often neglected in design and management.
Released applications need to be managed. This “water and feeding” is often delegated to another siloed infrastructure or cloud group which do not understand the application intimately.
All this costs your business more and introduces risk as well as technical and operational complexity. Even with a DevOps model, where more is done by cross-functional resources, the complexity remains and is just managed by hiring expensive “unicorn” type resources which can work all the way up the stack.
A solid no-code development platform allows you to deliver your application to your users through Software as a Service. Your application’s runtime deployed to production runs on the cloud with a hyper-scale technology stack which provides the high availability and resilience you need to deliver for your business.
Hosting your application becomes a no-brainer. It is done for you. Operationally, all you have to concentrate on is your application feature roadmap.
6. A proven secure environment to run your applications
One huge part of running your application on the cloud or on-premise is securing it. With the interconnectedness of technology these days your applications need to be built with security first in mind. Attack surfaces are huge and this means you need very clever SecOps or DevSecOps resources to build security controls, manage and monitor your environments. This presents a huge challenge to even the largest enterprise companies and will surely be one you experience as well.
Our enterprise-grade no-code application development platform provides you with a solid foundation to build your apps. The underlying infrastructure is secured to international standards like ISO27001:2013, IEC27001:2013, NEN 7510 etc.
Security is job zero for these platforms and you can leverage all the experience and maturity of a provider who hosts applications for hundreds of customers. It’s becoming a no-brainer for companies now to outsource their security.
Who would you bet on? Your internal engineers to secure your apps or proven providers which specialise in securing their environments.
That’s the power of no-code for you. Have you got any questions about these business advantages of no-code application development platform WEM? Get in touch with Zero Code Solution