When it comes to low-code, most discourse revolves around citizen developers. These are generally business analysts or other non-coders who harness low-code to automate business processes or create business apps by abstracting coding tasks with a user-friendly interface. While unleashing creativity and empowering these users to create their own apps is extremely helpful in the digital-first enterprise, it overlooks the potential for low-code to impact the delivery pipelines for professional development teams as technology leaders look to increase productivity and reduce burnout.
Low-Code Enables Faster, More Collaborative Automation for Everyone
As delivery cycles accelerate and consumers expect richer, more dynamic experiences, everyone in the development ecosystem is being asked to do more at a faster pace. Test automation has long been trending as a solution to this problem. But code-heavy automation tools introduced their own challenges, often siloing experienced coders into one toolset and forcing non-coders into another. Companies have had to invest in more tools and manage the inefficiencies created by separate tech stacks. In addition, developers, SDETs, and other professionals comfortable using code-heavy test automation tools had to spend valuable time maintaining test scripts and managing testing infrastructure.
Low-code solutions bridge these gaps by creating a single, unified toolset that enables seamless collaboration across the entire software development organization. Enterprises save money, team members save time, and DevOps processes become more mature.
Low-Code Benefits for Developers and Development Leaders
Developer shortages continue to plague software organizations, introducing serious capacity limitations that are likely to worsen as digital transformation becomes more urgent. At the same time, developers and team leaders are increasingly concerned with reducing burnout. Low-code solutions help reduce the load on developers for rote (boring) work and lets them focus on building new features and products.
Data suggests that developers spend less than half their time coding applications, meaning that low-code solutions have a significant opportunity to reduce tasks that are taking developer focus away from building new features. A prime example: software testing. 43% of developers say that testing is their biggest pain point, yet integrating more testing earlier in development cycles is proven to reduce the effort needed to find and fix bugs. Low-code test automation platforms reconcile the need for more testing with less engineering hours by triggering automatic end-to-end tests in the background every time a developer saves their work. If a test fails, low-code platforms further reduce the burden on developers by integrating with popular tools like Jira, Microsoft Teams, and Slack to share all relevant details. Low-code makes testing a frictionless part of developer workflows, helping development teams ship quality code at a higher velocity.
Low-Code Benefits for QA Specialists, Manual Testers, and Business Roles
Similarly to development teams, team members with less coding experience save time and effort with low-code by automating rote tasks. But these teams also benefit from having their expertise elevated by low-code solutions. Looking at the example above, where developers can trigger automated end-to-end tests as they code, quality engineering and software testing teams are collaborating with developers by building those tests and connecting coding practices to the customer experience.
Quality engineers have a unique and valuable skill set that encompasses product knowledge, technical skills, and an empathetic understanding of the end user. With low-code, quality professionals can create, run, and update tests that best reflect how customers are actually using the product. QA analysts, QA specialists, and other roles specializing in manual testing can harness their product knowledge to automate routine tests and invest more time in performing exploratory testing for new features, ensuring that development teams can ship new innovations with greater confidence.
Business roles, such as marketing, product managers, and customer success teams, can also contribute their expertise during development cycles with low-code solutions. Marketing and customer experience can easily run tests across critical customer journeys for new products or ensure that discount codes work as expected. Quality becomes a holistic, collaborative exercise that enables everyone to contribute for better customer outcomes with low-code test automation.
Maximize Expertise and Easily Share Knowledge Across Development Teams
Team members with all levels of coding experience benefit from collaboration enabled by low-code solutions. When quality engineers, customer experience, and other teammates can contribute their knowledge and skills within sprint cycles, developers can focus on building new products and deliver higher quality software at a faster pace. Everyone has the same workflows, goals, and insights into their product and their customers, reducing the time and effort needed to work together.
That collaboration unlocks more value for the enterprise, which can consolidate tools as more team members embrace a low-code tech stack. More collaborative teams can introduce new innovations to market faster, delivering a critical competitive advantage in a digital-first world.
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