Low-code, No-code or Flex-code… Choose the Right Fit

At RTS, we constantly invest and investigate the use of new platforms into our development methodology. Flex-code has been gaining ground in the IT world and we are exploring the deployment of this methodology and concepts before getting into action.

Every year, enterprises spend almost $500 billion on building Bespoke Software solutions. The common saying “One Size Does Not Fit All”, is true as different businesses have a variety of specific needs.

Bespoke solutions can address the specific needs of a business and provide an edge over non-configurable or low-configurable off the shelf software solutions. However, developing bespoke solution requires good amount of patience, time and budget. Other challenges include integration with legacy systems, balancing the interests of multiple internal teams, reliance on a small pool of programmers with skills, experience, and knowledge specific to a platform or language to build and maintain them.

Over the past few decades, the demand of Bespoke solutions and enterprise software development has increased many folds and hence the need and desire to hasten the time to market. This led to the evolution of Rapid Application Development programming languages and new methodologies like AGILE and Kanban. But studies and research have shown that the developers were creating software 20% slower than they did earlier despite the advances in languages and methodologies.

The entry of No-Code and Low-Code platforms over the last few years have changed the dynamics of bespoke development, primarily through the participation of citizen developers. No-Code and Low-code are a paradigm shift in Software development providing a visual approach to abstract and automate steps of the application lifecycle and streamline the delivery of a variety of solutions. Citizen Developer approach breaks down traditional silos of business and IT promoting continuous collaboration. The no-code and low-code platforms dramatically improve how enterprises build, deploy and manage custom software by shortening the time to market, improving quality, and lowering the costs of both initial builds and ongoing maintenance.

Gartner predicts by 2024, no-code and low-code application development will be responsible for more than 65% of application development activity. Is this the end of Bespoke Solution development? The answer is NO because the no-code and low-code platforms still require highly skilled professionals to custom-code interfaces, fine tune the performance, right size the infrastructure, and above all innovative and cutting-edge business models. All these are beyond the skillsets of citizen developers and the capabilities of no-code and low-code.

Flex-Code offers flexible coding options that provide benefits of low-code and no-code platforms such as ease-of-use and visual interfaces as well as offers higher-code functionality for greater customization and control. With flex-code users can build applications by using their own preferred language. The bottom line is that flex-code has value proposition for all developers throughout the organization, whether they are citizen developers or highly skilled developers.

Flex-code has a great degree of flexibility working with no-code, low-code platforms from basic application development, to somewhat complex application development. Flex-code has value propositions for all developers throughout the organization, lessens the work of developers of all genre, gives them time back to focus on more complex logic and develop more applications they can utilize. Additionally, flex-code simplifies companies’ software development platform choice and enables compatibility and interchangeability among different approaches.

Though flex-code seems to be the best fit for all problems, the real challenge for selecting the correct approach lies in the ecosystem. Further, the decision to fit flex-code as a corporate strategy depends on IT/developers, end users, business users, and citizen developers in business teams. While flex code has its pros and cons, it can help in speeding up new custom software development.