Usage scenario
With the increased demand for new business solutions and the need to move into the cloud, companies need to support professionals to make the most of their expertise and time to keep up with the most relevant requests. In this lesson, you'll learn more about the role of developers in helping businesses to overcome challenges and barriers in achieving digital transformation, as well as how high productivity tooling enables teams to work more efficiently and focus on the most challenging projects.
Challenges and market trends
Business demands for new applications and extensions are skyrocketing. Companies need to transform their inefficient and manual business processes and workflows into modern, cloud-based business applications. Of course, such projects are time-consuming, costly, and require significant developer resources. However, there aren’t just enough resources to address all requests and requirements: enterprise developers are highly skilled professionals in short supply. The ones at hand have their performance impacted by having to deal with technical debt, an excess of different tools, and fragmented technology stacks.
The scarcity of skilled IT professionals is one of the main challenges companies are facing around the world, which directly impacts not only the company's ability to innovate and develop new products, but also its cloud transformation initiatives. In addition, it is anticipated that the labor market for professional developers will become even more competitive over the next few years (Bhagat Nainani: Accelerate Cloud Transformation Initiatives with Low-Code Development, August 2022).
But how can enterprises help their existing development teams to boost productivity? As Arnal Dayaratna, research director, Software Development at IDC said: "The needs of developers and businesses to improve developer productivity have led to the proliferation of tools that facilitate high productivity with respect to software development" (IDC TechScape: Worldwide High-Productivity Developer Technologies, doc # #US45161219, June 2019).
These high productivity tools span a broad variety of technologies such as so called low-code and no-code development tools. No-code development replaces traditional, code-based development with visual development mainly suited for non-technical people. Low-code development allow developers to combine traditional development with model driven and / or visually guided development. Thus, it is suited for part time developers as well as for professional developers. High productivity development tools help reduce time-intensive coding, even for complex applications, and allow development teams to reuse instead rebuild, rising speed-to-market and creating cost-efficiencies. In recent research from IDC, the majority of IT respondents experienced an average of 25% gain in speed, when using so called low-code tools compared to developing with custom code. (IDC White Paper, sponsored by SAP, Scaling Low Code Success, doc ##US49536322, August 2022). The results highlighted financial gains, improved developer productivity, lowered costs, and the ability to deliver more applications with the same number of developers as the main outcomes of using high productivity tools such as low-code development tools (IDC White Paper, sponsored by SAP, Scaling Low Code Success, doc # #US49536322, August 2022).
And, when asked for the top reasons to adopt codeless development, full-time developers nominated the improved staff retention, acceleration of development, organizational mandates and requirements, staffing shortages, and simplified development experience (IDC Infographic, sponsored by SAP, The Low-Code Development Imperative, doc # #US48361121, November 2021) (compare next figure).
Source of the figure: (IDC Infographic, sponsored by SAP, The Low-Code Development Imperative, doc # #US48361121, November 2021)