Time To Start Low-Coding!

In recent years, most governments and organizations around the world have joined the Digital Transformation. The demand for software has dramatically increased in many directions. Some needs are to modernize old software, while others are to develop new internal tools for employees and implement some process automation programs, which make life easier and more organized. In addition, facing customers with different channels (web — mobile) and having multiple apps to manage their needs become a must. Besides that, the evolution of startups makes the market hungry for software. As a result, we can see that there is a high demand for software development.

On the other hand, the resources — by which I mean the skilled developers, especially the experienced ones — don’t match the needs. Every day, we can find tons of job ads in the recruitment platforms, but not enough qualified engineers that are a fit. Also, the developers are distracted by various technologies and stacks, since every couple of days, a new web/mobile framework is introduced to the market. They start exploring it and learning how it works, then try to do some PoCs and end up facing some annoying bugs and having to watch the “How to do” tutorials. That is a time-consuming process and does not let the developers focus more on the engineering and the business, but to waste their time investigating the technology itself and how to implement the features technically. That brings us to the second observation, that there is a lack of expertise engineers.

Based on the previous two observations, we need a solution to fill the gap between the high demand for software development and the lack of expertise engineers. We need to search for a way to reduce the efforts needed to develop a new software, to use less manpower and less time to deliver. That is the magic of the Low-Code Platforms. If you read some statistics and have a look at some reports about low-code platforms (forrester, gartner), you will find that OutSystems is the #1 low-code platform in the world.

Using OutSystems can reduce the development time by up to 10 times and that is good enough for experienced developers to start filling the gap in the demand for software in an efficient way. I will give you an example of how it speeds up the process. One of the projects I worked on, was a software which has 5 modules. The product owner asked us to implement a new feature which is “Tagging” for the 5 modules.

That means the users of the software can add one or more tags to any record in these modules while it is created or updated. It also gives the user the ability to manage the tags and their types in a Backoffice system. I tried to calculate the time needed if I wanted to implement this feature in traditional native coding. I found that in the normal software development process, it needs a UI/UX designer, a Frontend developer and a Backend developer to be fully implemented, so it will take:

• 4 hours with the UI/UX guy to design a new style for this kind of components (multiple tags selection).
• 16 hours for the Frontend developer to design the component, develop the logic behind it, test all the edge cases, and fix all the unexpected bugs.
• 16 hours for the Backend developer to design the data model for the 5 modules, develop the required APIs and make sure that the code is optimized, secured and covered with all test cases.
• 4 hours are required to do the integration between Frontend and Backend.
• 8 hours to implement the Backoffice features, to manage the tags and their types.

In total, we need 48 hours to complete this feature with the efforts of the whole team. Thanks to OutSystems, it took me just 8 hours to get it done, tested, and deployed to the test environment. The client was surprised how fast I managed to complete it.

I designed the data model, then OutSystems generated the required screens in Backoffice by using the magical feature of drag & drop the new entities twice in the Backoffice canvas. I used a stable OutSystems UI component for the multiple tags selection and made it reusable by using the Block concept. I developed the logic of controlling the tags for each module and published. Done! I could not express how happy I felt when I saw the results.
So by using this technology, one developer can work as a full-stack, and deliver stable software with good UI/UX based on the rich OutSystems UI Components library.

Following on, I would like to send many thanks to the brains behind OutSystems, because it achieves every software engineer’s dreams, by using the drag & drop feature to implement any kind of applications, and to reduce the efforts of doing the repeated work. Having a lot of 3rd party integration components available in their platform also accelerates the overall development time for any system.

What are you waiting for? Start exploring and testing the platform for free with about 100 online courses and hundreds of webinars and tutorials, joining~500K members in its community. And don’t forgot to have a look on OutSystems partners list to find the team for any organization you know that wants to join the Digital Transformation ship without any technical debt.