Will no code/low code replace software developers and why you should start using no-code in your company now?

What is no-code?

The no-code movement is one of the most exciting and disruptive trends in tech today.

Over the past few years, there has been a lot of talk about no-code and how it will impact software development. But what exactly is no-code? And how could it possibly impact software development?

In this article, I’m going to explain what no-code is, how it came to be, where it’s going and why you should care.

In a nutshell, no-code stands for developing software without writing any code. Let’s say your company has an idea for digital transformation or to start a new business and in order to get started, you need to build a website or an app.

The usual development process requires good technical knowledge and long hours of coding by software engineers. No-code tools are designed to change that. They allow anyone to create a website or an app without actually needing to code anything. Well as we’ll see not anyone, but let’s say anyone from engineering teams.

Most of the no-code platforms include the following features with more or less success:

• Ability to build a user interface with drag-drop components. (Retool, Webflow, AppGyver, Bubble, and many other tools offer the same features). The core differences between platforms will be the richness of components catalog and configuration capabilities.

• Management of structured data storage. Some tools include a simple way to create content types or data structures. You define the way your project’s data will look like, what kind of objects your app will manipulate. For example, you might define a Product as a collection of fields, including a Title, Price, Description, Photos, Availability, Size, Weight, etc. No-code platforms will then provide your app with a simple way to create, read, update and delete those objects.

• External API integration. Most of the low/no-code tools will let you connect to external REST or GraphQL APIs. It will usually manage for you authentication tokens, retrieval of data, and some level of parametrization of queries. For me, it’s the most powerful part of no-code, as you can easily extend your application or site capabilities with popular SaaS tools. For example, you can simply integrate MailChimp or SendGrid API to push emails, Google Sheets API to access Excel data, or Alexa API to add voice commands to your app.

• Workflow and events management. This last feature is the most complicated and advanced of all. Only a few platforms include it. Basically, it let you define triggers on your UI components: if the user clicks on the button if the user checks this box if the user selects something in my dropdown selector when I receive a response from this API when a new product is created in the database… Then connecting to those triggers, you can define some actions: Create a new entry in the database, call an API, modify something in the UI.

And what is low-code then?

The frontier between low and no-code is blurry. When the business process and user flow you try to automate through your app are complicated, you’ll face the limits of the no-code. Let’s take an example. Imagine you need to show to the end-user a curated list of products from your e-commerce platform, ordered by the total margin you make. Your e-commerce platform offers you an API with the following endpoints :

• getProducts : returns all products with their metadata
• getProductSales : returns for a given SKU the total sales for a given period of time
• getProductBuyPrice : returns for a given SKU the cost of the product

Mentally, it’s easy to describe what you need to create a dashboard with a last week’s top 10 of most profitable products :

1. Take all products
2. For each product get sales for the last week
3. For same product get cost
4. Store the value of Total Sales — Cost x Number of Sold Units
5. Order the table of products by the margin
6. Show first 10

But when it comes to no-code platforms these simple dashboards require tricky data manipulations. You need to be able to loop through data, store intermediate values, manage the ordering of arrays. It’s almost impossible to create this kind of algorithm using only visual tools offered by no-code platforms.

The low-code platform offers you a simple way to integrate code. Tools, like Retool, for example, let you write plain javascript. Therefore you will never be blocked in your project as at any time you can write a small piece of code.

So, can no-code or low-code tools replace developers?

There’s a lot of talk about the power of no-code and low-code tools, but one question that doesn’t get asked enough is: can these tools really replace developers?

The idea that non-developers could build their own software applications, or that business users could collaborate effectively with developers to build software applications as needed, has been around for decades. In the 1990s, Microsoft introduced Visual Basic as a way to provide a simplified interface for creating desktop applications. The low-code/no-code movement has taken this idea to heart and aims to make it accessible to more people.

Are we finally at the point where no-code and low-code software tools can replace developers?

The short answer is no — maybe not yet anyway. While no-code and low-code tools can make developers’ lives easier, they are not going away anytime soon.

Let’s take an example of what is needed to create a new application or site:

1. Understand the need of end-users. What kind of process are we trying to optimize? What happens today and what should be automated?
2. Analyze the existing environment. Where the data is? How can we access it? How do we manage authentication? Who will access my app? What APIs should I use?
3. Define the data model. What objects should I store? What are the fields? Which are required?
4. Describe user flows and associated screens. Where do users start their interaction with my app? How do I onboard them? What are the actions they can perform? What are the outputs of my app?
5. Create the app, test it with users and deploy. Does my app solve issues? What blocks users in their journey? How can I make it better, simpler? How do I deploy and train users in my company? How do I make it accessible, multilingual, performant, and secure?

While no & low code platform simplifies the creation of an app, it requires engineers to work on complex business processes and abstraction layers to actually define what this app should do and how it should do it. Not everyone’s brain is wired to manipulate abstract concepts, data structures, and call flows.

The popular concept of citizen developers works for simple applications, removing repetitive tasks without writing lines of code, but you still need professional developers to build complex applications.

The engineering mindset is a tremendous asset for an organization. It provides the ability to see, articulate and solve problems in a logical way. They have a natural tendency to look for problems, organize and structure information. Engineers can go from abstract concepts to concrete solutions.

However, not everyone sees the world this way. Most people are unable to manipulate abstract concepts and are not wired to think logically in a sequential manner.

The code is not the problem, the complexity of the business world is.

Why developers and IT teams should use No code Tools?

As I just said developers will not lose the jobs due to no-code trends, but why should they use them? Why no write complex logic, backend logic, and architecture using their coding skills in beautiful languages like NodeJS, Go, Python or Rust?

Because no & low code platforms are tremendous accelerators of time-to-market and remove what every single developer hates the most: debugging and deploying. Developers should see those tools as the quintessence of coding pleasure: the creation of new tools for users, without the pain of looking for a semi-colon and dependency problem in your code. Let’s see what kind of painful processes no-code and low-code platforms remove from developers’ shoulders :

1. Scaling: your app can be used by 2 or by 2 million users. The scaling is not your problem
2. Builds & Deployments: usually all platforms come with some level of staging. New features are deployed instantly and without pain.
3. Data I/O. Database modeling, writing classes, ORM queries, data binding are all provided by your tools
4. UI design. You don’t need to write code to organize your components on your page.
5. Selection and maintenance of the right libraries. There are over 1.3 million NPM packages available, which one you should use?
6. Authentication and security. Every single line of code you write may contain security holes that usually are never addressed by developers rushing to deploy features in production. No-code platforms are hosting thousands of apps and solve security and performance issues at a large scale.
7. Documentation. Traditional coding requires extensive documentation of the code. The only way for newcomers to understand the logic of a piece of code is to read the documentation. No/low code platforms are self-descriptive. Want to know what a button does, or where the data comes from in a given table? Just click on it.
8. Enterprise features. When it comes to large-scale, enterprise projects, app features development is only a part of the job. Your code needs to ship a set of features required by different policies: backups, traceability, automated access audits, logs, alerts, disaster recovery tooling, etc. All those features are already included in the enterprise plans of no-code platforms.
9. Support and maintenance. It’s the hell of each developer. Getting back to a code-base after months, trying to solve an issue, update a library or develop a new feature. It takes days or weeks to get our head around the code we wrote. And it gets worse if you jump in on a project you’ve never worked on. With no-code, it’s easy. You know exactly where the problem is and how to solve it.

What is the impact of no-code on IT projects methodology?

The no-code movement does not only change the way you build IT projects but also changes the way you organize them.

The first thing to note is that because no-code tools are so easy to use, they reduce the need for specialized skills in developing your app. The development team can be more diverse and include more business people than more traditional development teams. In fact, it could be just one person with a bit of technical knowledge who can use a no-code tool and is accountable for delivering the application.

Iterations can be as short as a day or even hours. Demo day becomes demo hour where new features can be shown within minutes of completion. User testing can be performed in real-time and users do not need to wait until an application is released to try out new features. App development can be performed within the user’s environment and this allows developers to see how apps work in the context of their users’ workflows.

For us, at code.store, where we build tons of no-code and low-code apps, The era of extreme agility arrives and it will accelerate both quality and innovation in your organization.

What are the risks of no-code?

GDPR

If you’re building a web app without code, the last thing you probably want to think about is data privacy. But it’s your responsibility to ensure that your app complies with privacy laws — even if it seems like a complicated nightmare.

The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is an EU law on data protection and privacy for all individuals in the EU and the European Economic Area (EEA). It came into effect on May 25, 2018.

As a no-code maker, this can be particularly tricky if your chosen no-code platform is based in the USA. The laws are different, so these platforms might not be GDPR compliant by default.

In order to comply with GDPR, no-code platforms should:

• Include a statement on what data they collect, why they collect it, and where they store it
• Include an option for users to remove their data completely from the platform
• Make it easy for users to access their stored data
• Make sure that user data is encrypted and backed up in case of hack or server failure

Lack of visibility

The problem with a low code no-code platform is that you can’t see what the code does. The platform can be developed in any language and the vendor has full control over how the platform is built. This lack of visibility on the internal architecture of a low code no code tool means you have to put your trust in the vendor to develop it securely.

It’s like buying a jar of the jam without knowing what type of fruit it contains or how it has been made. You could be buying an old, moldy jar, filled with low-quality ingredients, or a fresh jar of delicious jam — but you just don’t know until you try it.

Security

Security needs to be a priority from the start, no matter what is being developed (and how simple and pared-down it might appear to the naked eye). If components of the platform have been developed insecurely, this poses a potentially insidious problem.

A developer using an insecure component may not even be aware that they are using something potentially vulnerable, because it has been cloaked as legitimate code by the platform provider.

The easiest way to understand this issue is with an example: imagine you are building a website using WordPress. You use one plugin that has been built insecurely, which might allow anyone to edit your site’s content or delete your database.

As with any piece of software, vulnerabilities can’t be patched out unless they’re first identified. This is a difficult task if you don’t know exactly what’s lurking in your product’s codebase — if it’s even available for inspection at all.

Access control

When it comes to access control, significant issues can arise in a no-code environment without the proper controls in place. Simply put, when end-users have the ability to make decisions over access control independent of an enterprise-level policy, with the potential to open up pathways to data that should be closed, it exposes the business to significantly more risk.

The outcome is often a proliferation of applications that are not governed by any centralized policy — which makes it almost impossible to secure access and ensure security compliance in these environments. It’s fine if you have a few apps that need to be developed quickly for a short period of time but when you start creating hundreds of apps within your organization, you need to make sure you have the proper measures in place.

Picking the right tool

There are thousands of no/low-code platforms out there. Selecting the right tool for your organization, team, and project specifics are key. You need to quickly understand the main features and level of customization that you’ll need for your project before picking a tool. Otherwise, you might get blocked in your journey with a necessary feature that cannot be done with the no-code tool you’ve selected.

The good news is that the number of great tools out there is constantly growing. The bad news is that you now have more choices to make.

Here are some questions you can ask yourself to pick the right tool:

• What is the nature of your project?
• Do you need to create a static website or an interactive app?
• Do you need a mobile app or a web application?
• Do you need an integration with third-party services?
• Is it going to be publicly accessible or internal only?
• How big is the project?
• How much customizations does it require?

There are many no-code tools for building websites, but not all of them allow you to build web applications. There are also many tools that allow you to build apps, but not all of them give you the same level of customization.

Need help to leverage risks?

The best way is to have a chat with no-code experts. Ping us.

What are the low code solutions you should start with?

1. Webflow: a perfect tool to design beautiful, static websites, with a pinch of dynamic content. Use it to create landing pages et corporate websites that require custom design.
2. Bubble.io: Perfect low code platform to build almost any possible app. Their ecosystem of themes, plugins, and documentation is amazing.
3. Retool: No backend connects to any API, offers a simple way to inject code everywhere. The most elegant tool for building internal business apps integrated with your legacy platforms. And you can even host it in your private cloud.
4. UserGuiding: A perfect tool to create customers and users on-boarding. Absolutely needed for enterprise projects and complex apps.
5. Airtable: Imagine google sheets on steroids. That’s exactly what Airtable is. Power database system with human-oriented UX and automatically generated REST API for each table.
6. Notion: Workplace system that offers wiki-like editing capabilities, integrated databases, APIs. Like GoogleDocs but offering much more flexibility and integrations.
7. Automate.io: Connect over 200 apps together, transfer data, trigger and react on events, transform and feed your apps.
8. Shopify: the most powerful e-commerce platform ever created in the Universe :)

But it’s only a fraction of no & low-code tools we master at code.store.

How much costs a no-code project?

First of all, the no-code movement is a new industry and it is difficult to know how much exactly a project will cost, but there are some indications on the matter. Well, as for any project, the best way to know is to talk with a no-code expert agency, like code.store is.

Generally speaking, the cost cut is about x3 to x4 compared to a classic app.

In terms of timeline, it’s less obvious, specifically on large-scale enterprise projects, as there is a log of activities that are not directly related to the coding: gathering needs, validations, audits, data accessibility, acquisition of licenses, UX, etc… But a rule of thumb is: twice faster.

The main reason behind these figures are:

• Less development time (potentially zero)
• Less testing/debugging time (much less)
• Less communication time (less human resources = less communication)
• Lower maintenance cost (no need of IT guys anymore)

Example: We’ve built a complete e-commerce & CRM front-end app, consuming APIs from Salesforce Commerce Cloud and HubSpot CRM, deployed in over 900 stores in the world. The cheapest competitor provided a global budget of 325.000€ and 7 months to build the app using classical coding. With our extreme agility and Retool, we’ve been able to complete sell the project for 87.000€, with a 3 months timeline !!

Want to have an idea of how much your project would cost if built by experts of no-code? Ping-us!