With hundreds of professional articles written during this year 2017, the topic of “Low-code apps” and “No-code apps” (also aliased “Citizen Development“) is clearly becoming a new hot trend alongside with FinTech, AI, IoT, Social Business and Big Data.

According to Gartner and Forrester studies, the shift to low-code platforms will accelerate at a fast pace during the next 5 years because IT services will not be able to deliver the huge amount of apps that the business is demanding.

Before we’ve decided to build PickaForm, we had previously developed and delivered more than 1 hundred applications to very different companies – small and big. Despite our customers are very different, we could clearly identify common patterns in the way people are working and collaborating. In particular when it comes to follow-up and informations sharing (projects, tasks, customers, contracts, customers claims, internal requests…) where at least 80% of the needs are identical.

To solve those recurrent collaboration problems, it became very clear that:

• with a custom development approach, application features always win
• with a low-code (or no-code) platform approach, business always wins

Why?

Because “custom development” means:

• defining & validating the requirements (can take a long time)
• finding the right company to develop it properly (can be challenging)
• deploying it for testing purpose
• finding people that wants to be part of the testing process (but nobody really has time for that)
• training people (“Yet another tool!”)
• getting back to the provider with a list of corrections (provided the testers have done their job properly)
• waiting for corrections
• deploying the corrections
• go in production… At last!

How long did it take? Too long.

Want to add a feature? Go back to the cycle…

Custom development process

Unlike this long process, low-code platforms provide out-of-the-box solutions that can be put in production immediately if necessary, and corrections can be made along the road with real-case feedbacks, and can even be made by users themselves (this is the core concept of Citizen Development).

You need 5 more fields in your form? Ok, let’s do it, it will take 2 minutes.

You need one more step in your workflow? Ok, let’s add one step, it will also take 2 minutes.

You want another report? Let’s build it together now, or even better: try to build it yourself!

Where custom developments give the priority to the features – “we want exactly this, like that” -, low-code platforms give the priority to the business cases – “we want to achieve this goal“.

Low-code apps are much faster to prototype, to deploy, and to improve. They give much more agility to the business. People can change their mind, test new things and remove things that finally doesn’t fit their needs. At nearly no cost.

The shift is so powerful that we’re now talking about “BusDev” (Business-Development) to compare it to the massive “DevOps” movement (Development-Operations).

At the end of the day, the complete and ideal chain of collaboration between the business, the developers and the system administrators should be: “BusDevOps”!

In this very active ecosystem, PickaForm targets to be one of the best low-code / no-code platform on the market, and we will always be there to help you setup your first project.

Speaking of that, why not for Christmas?

Merry Christmas!