To make significant improvements in the failure rate of enterprise application development, we need to take a radically different approach to every step of the development process.
Everyone knows that application development is a lengthy and involved process, especially at the enterprise level. From writing code from scratch to extensive testing — and all the critical steps in between — the traditional development model presents a complex, lengthy, and expensive challenge for enterprises.
In fact, this challenge is so large that in 2011, only 29% of enterprise software development projects were successful. To combat these low success rates and the associated frustrations, developers offered modified approaches like agile development and low-code software. These new methods gained popularity due to their promises of speed and simplicity for application development, but saw little real change. By 2015, the success rate of enterprise software development was still 29%.
So what needs to happen to help enterprise development succeed? While these new methods hoped to make improvements to the traditional development model, improvements could only offer so much. With organizations wasting an average of $97 million for every $1 billion invested in IT projects, it’s time to try something completely new.
No-code offers something entirely different than the attempts before it. Rather than modifying the existing process, it rebuilds the process from the ground up. What enterprise application development needs is a fundamentally different approach to get to the root of the problem — and no-code does just that. Here’s how no-code radically redefines three key steps of traditional application development for more successful outcomes:
1. Deciding on Technology
Today’s Process
With traditional development, there are so many decisions that need to be made just to set the groundwork for an application — all before you even start programming. Teams have to decide on the servers they’ll use, the languages they’ll code in, and the cloud provider they’ll work with. These decisions also require thought into security concerns, which require enhancements and proper documentation throughout the build and implementation.
The Challenge
While these decisions are no doubt important, they don’t tend to vary that much project to project. As a result, they waste time that could be better spent jumping right into the development process. Instead, what we need is a fully built environment and functional database where the best technologies have already been selected for you. And while we’re at it, top-notch security features should already be built in for audits and compliance.
How No-Code Helps
No-code eliminates this groundwork decision-making step entirely. No-code platforms provide teams with the ready-made infrastructure necessary to get into the development process as quickly as possible. By deciding on the underlying technology of application development for you, no-code allows organizations to focus on what matters most: the overall success of their IT projects.
2. Building Out the Development Team
Today’s Process
In the traditional application development process, a robust team of qualified professionals needs to be identified, hired, and trained to kick-off a project. But before any training can occur, the ongoing skills shortage in the IT sector complicates the hiring process. Making quality hires is increasingly difficult in today’s tight talent market, which is especially true as tech giants such as Google, Apple, and Amazon move quickly to attract top talent.
The Challenge
Even if an enterprise successfully identifies a team with the desired skill sets, they face another challenge to bridge the gap between the business and tech teams. Especially for the developers that will be coding these projects, onboarding is an extensive process. It’s often tricky and time-consuming to ensure that the business team successfully transfers the strategy and intended use cases of a project to the development team. And while developers are an essential part of building effective applications, they tend to be more focused on technology, which means they have less insight into the proper market and business requirements to build for scale.
How No-Code Helps
To avoid these challenges, application development needs a system that will enable smaller teams, will have minimal restrictions on the necessary skill sets of team members, and will bring key business leaders closer to the process. No-code makes that possible. By empowering decision-makers who dictate business logic to act as engineers, no-code can help enterprises develop applications that fit their original goals and intended timeline.
3. Development: Managing the Back-end and Front-end
Today’s Process
With traditional application development, there’s an incredible amount of back-end foundational work that needs to be accomplished before you even see the first logo or basic visual configuration on your screen. Building applications from the ground up in this way has proven time and again to be costly, labor-intensive, and hard to keep on timeline.
How No-Code Helps
This slow process to get from back-end development to front-end development means that enterprises have to accept extremely long wait times before they can even begin showing their initial progress to key stakeholders — and even longer to get the product in the hands of end-users. Feedback is an essential part of application development, and these delays make getting and implementing that feedback significantly more difficult. This is particularly true if you’re aiming for Agile development with iterative feedback throughout the process.
To radically redefine this step of the development process, developers need a functional back-end that’s already set-up and ready to build on. This kind of platform would allow developers to dive into the front-end and start doing tangible, visible work from the get-go. With the no-code tools that make this possible, developers and business leaders can focus on the last 10% of work instead of the full 100% — essentially arriving at a better end product with a tenth of the work of traditional application development, ten times faster.
A Better Way Forward
In today’s digitally-driven marketplace, application development is a key element of any successful enterprise. However, the risks, costs, and delays built into the traditional application development process have become increasingly unsustainable, especially as the size and scope of IT projects grow and become more critical to success.
We shouldn’t settle when it comes to the tools we use and the platforms we rely on for application development, particularly when it costs teams so much money and projects so frequently fail. By rethinking the whole process and opting for a configuration-based, no-code method, we can simplify application development, speed up labor processes, and ultimately create an end product that is better aligned with business goals.
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