6 technologists discuss how no-code tools are changing software development

'More of an impact on what IT is doing rather than the number of people doing it'

The no-code/low-code space has been expanding rapidly in the past few years. As we learned from our last survey of investors active in the space earlier this month, the technology democratizes access to modern software development, but there are still some kinks to iron out. Mass adoption is still held up, however: many organizations prefer to build from scratch, and complete end-to-end solutions are still nowhere to be found.

To get a more in-depth look at the technical aspects of the space, we decided to talk to some of the technologists ushering in the no-code/low-code revolution.

To start off, it appears that no-code/low-code tools hasn’t had much impact on the number of people working in IT. Deb Gildersleeve, CIO of Quickbase, said the propagation of no-code/low-code will help IT focus on more demanding tasks.

“We believe that IT needs to spend more time thinking about how technology impacts people. Tools that eliminate menial and time-consuming tasks help save time and energy to focus on bigger picture issues that make people’s lives easier,” she said.

No-code/low-code incurs technical debt to a degree, an aspect that has become a major talking point. David Hsu, founder and CEO of Retool, feels that it’s less a case of eliminating technical debt at present and more about choosing where the debt would be an acceptable consequence.

“What can be done is deciding which technical debt is worth the flexibility low-code confers, and which technical debt does not reach that threshold. For example, giving non-technical builders the ability to design and define their own interfaces feels very worth it from where we’re standing,” he said.  “On the other hand, we find that letting non-technical developers manage integrations, data flow, business logic, and CRON jobs — without some level of technical oversight or guardrails — is not worth the technical debt.”

For this survey, we spoke to executives about their favorite no-code/low-code tools, the different impacts these development suites have had on the IT job market, and how to ensure minimal technical debt, among other things.

We spoke to:

Patrick Jean, CTO, OutSystems

How much of the work that you manage is done via no-code/low-code at present? In 2031, will developers still be required to learn how to code?

As CTO of a low-code platform that pioneered this category 20 years ago, everything I do relates to low-code and how the tool can help business leaders and developers build the serious applications they require. In fact, we build as much of our own stack as possible using our low-code platform – for our UI tools we have a few base, high-code components, and a large part of the remaining OutSystems UI platform is built in low-code.

Looking ahead, there will always be a need for developers with expertise in high-code. Instead of thinking about these tools eradicating the need to learn how to code, they should be thought of as a way to remove the burden of long-term, undifferentiated maintenance work present in application development. Low-code application development platforms will handle this undifferentiated work and developers will not have to worry about that.

What are your favorite no-code/low-code tools?

There are an abundance of no-code/low-code tools available that fit a range of developer needs. Many tools in this category solve for a narrow set of problems and often run into roadblocks when they need to scale or evolve over time.

In my experience, what businesses need is a platform that combines agility, performance and scale that results in high-quality and secure applications. One that encompasses both high expressiveness and high productivity of developers and provides full elite CI/CD capabilities.

As long as you have software, there will always be a need for people that are capable of engineering software from the ground up. Deb Gildersleeve, CIO, Quickbase

Companies should seek out enterprise-grade low-code tools that allow them to build critical apps that solve serious business challenges while optimizing security, compliance, and scale, and removing issues like legacy code and integrations.

Is the rise of no-code/low-code impacting the number of people working in IT?

No-code/low-code tools do not impact the number of people working in IT. Instead, they optimize the role of IT, helping to modernize legacy systems, eradicate technical debt, and enable them to build applications at a rapid pace.

It helps IT professionals empower their own teams to build the applications they need rather than rely on off-the-shelf options, and allows teams and developers to focus on more meaningful, creative work rather than maintaining outdated back-end systems or doing menial tasks.

One differentiator for no-code/low-code tools is whether they can embody the CI/CD process with appropriate governance and compliance, ensuring that companies separate privileged access to different production and non-production environments.

As more businesses adopt low-code platforms, we’re going to see IT departments grow in importance as they add greater value through custom applications with much greater speed and agility. This area is rapidly growing and aids in closing the massive gap in development talent we’re facing.

Which other services do you think could be offered along with no-code/low-code to make it a more attractive package for app development?

One of the biggest trends we’re seeing is the need to build serious apps that can quickly scale to hundreds of thousands and even millions of users. The problem for many developers is, doing that requires developing apps to run in the cloud at internet-scale, using best practices of modern cloud architectures and technologies, which can be incredibly complex and expensive.

This is forcing a transition to cloud-native development platforms that can deliver the kind of scale and developer productivity that organizations need to compete in a cloud-first world. These platforms will harness the power of containers and Kubernetes along with other state-of-the-art cloud technologies to empower any company to operate like the tech elite.

Can no-code/low code reduce the current engineering bottleneck, or is that still a few years away?

Enterprise-grade low-code tools can reduce the current engineering bottleneck in a few ways. First come the massive productivity gains made possible by enabling developers to focus their time and resources on innovative, creative work. These tools free up the hindrances caused by spinning cycles trying to improve legacy systems, move past technical debt, and offload the responsibility of maintaining and securing systems.

While not every no-code/low-code platform on the market has these capabilities, there are tools that meaningfully reduce bottlenecks both at the onset of creating an application, and most importantly, through the entire lifecycle of that app — no matter how it evolves or scales.

In essence, the more fully featured low-code tools reduce the time a single developer spends in toil and maintenance work, and makes development accessible to a larger number of people. This is happening today and will only continue to reduce the engineering bottleneck as more companies and people adopt these tools.

If this technology fulfills its promise, what changes do you expect to see in the day-to-day work of a traditional software developer?

We’ve seen technology make people’s jobs easier in almost every industry, and software development should be no exception. As we face a significant developer shortage, it is essential to find ways to free up developers’ time so they can focus on building serious applications in the most efficient ways possible.

Low-code platforms will change the day-to-day work of a traditional software developer by incorporating automation and standardization to lower friction, errors and technical debt while improving security and performance by implementing best practices and proven architectures. This frees developers up to focus on creativity, innovation, user experience, staying agile, and doing what they do best — building differentiated apps that solve challenges, capture market opportunities, and modernize their businesses.

A lot of users who work on no-code/low-code don’t have a technical background. What can no-code/low-code development suites do to ensure minimal technical debt?

Technical debt often occurs when teams feel pressure to build applications at breakneck speed without the time to consider the long-term consequences. This can be particularly true if developers don’t have the technical background to work as quickly and effectively as peers with years of experience.

But the right low-code platform allows developers of all skill levels to build fast and right. While I can’t speak about other tools, there are several key areas built into our platform that help developer teams limit the buildup of technical debt:

  1. We offer a visual, model-driven development environment with AI-based assistance that ensures teams can build apps in just days or weeks using our TrueChange engine that tracks changes at the point of design, not later in the pipeline when integrating changes is costly. With this approach, we know the impact of change early and can build the appropriate tech stack for the application based upon the intent of the application.
  2. Our integrated tools and automation services ensure that modern, enterprise-grade, cloud-native applications are secure, resilient, manageable and built to scale because our development platform and application hosting is fully automated, and standardized using best in class cloud native application design.
  3. We have an AI-powered automation layer that makes sure nothing breaks when teams are making a change. Apps are able to run seamlessly without rewriting when new tech comes along.

It’s critical for development suites similar to ours to ensure guardrails are in place so that non-developers can participate more directly in the development and feedback process.

In your experience, are users looking for a more holistic package, or do they prefer different solutions for each aspect of development?

The most effective solution is the simplest solution that solves the need. If developers can find that in one integrated, holistic solution then that’s the first choice. A platform that can help developers through every step of the process, whether that entails assisting them with a specific aspect of development, or empowering them to quickly build serious apps from start to finish, will deliver an app with the lowest risk, the fastest speed and the best fit. That’s what developers want.

Developer teams are under tremendous pressure to quickly build new apps that can scale as well as maintain and modernize existing systems. That, coupled with the fact that it’s becoming harder to find developer talent, means we need to make the process as intuitive and seamless as possible, but still powerful.

What sort of metrics would an IT department look at to gauge the success of no-code/low-code development tools in their workspace?

The nirvana for IT departments looks like this: solving business needs by building serious apps, achieving developer productivity, and scale those long into the future with little accumulation of tech debt without being burdened with ongoing maintenance.

Here are the measures of success for IT departments for no-code/low-code platforms: speed of development, zero maintenance effort, meets compliance requirements, apps have fit-for-purpose features, with the necessary availability, performance and security.

Deb Gildersleeve, CIO, Quickbase

Is the rise of no-code/low-code impacting the number of people working in IT?

We see more of an impact on what IT is doing rather than the number of people doing it. IT talent is already very hard to come by, and we see no-code/low code as an enabler of more strategic business value and free time to focus on important things. IT’s role shifts to one of governance instead of execution, which ultimately helps them deliver more value as a business leader.

Can no-code/low code reduce the current engineering bottleneck, or is that still a few years away?

There’s no question that no-code/low code tools are taking the burden off engineering in a variety of circumstances. One common situation is where non-technical employees like analysts, administrators or project managers find new and creative ways to get more out of their existing resources and get their jobs done more efficiently.

These “citizen developers” are solving their own problems and increasingly less reliant on software engineers. They’re tech-savvy, curious and have identified a better way of working. This is happening right now across hundreds of companies that we work with on a daily basis.

These situations don’t require time-intensive involvement from IT, but they do need to be set up and managed properly. In these circumstances, the role of engineering shifts from execution to governance, which is still a burden, but a lesser and diminishing burden over time when configured appropriately.

If this technology fulfills its promise, what changes do you expect to see in the day-to-day work of a traditional software developer?

Software developers are spending less time on menial tasks. They’re also having an easier time navigating through complex workflows and relying more on pre-configured and automated processes. Both of these improvements in day-to-day work allow for reduced backlogs and evolving the role more to being a problem solver instead of someone who takes orders.

How much of the work that you manage is done via no-code/low-code at present? In 2031, will developers still be required to learn how to code?

As long as you have software, there will always be a need for people that are capable of engineering software from the ground up, whether that’s called coding or not. But more importantly, what we believe will happen is this broader bifurcation of the no-code/low code market.

We’ve already seen that the market is breaking off into two fundamentally different categories: application platforms that make professional developers faster (low-code), and platforms that equip more people throughout the business to automate processes and workflows (citizen development and automation platforms).

These two groups need different capabilities in technology platforms. Citizen developers and business technologists need a platform tuned for rapid solution development and iteration that still supports the security and governance needs of an enterprise-grade platform.

Professional software developers require a platform that supports the traditional software development lifecycle for application development, has controllable and customizable UI, and has specific requirements for the technology that forms the application, just to name a few. The former is not a simple subset of the latter.

In the next ten years, we expect the pool of heavy-duty developers to shrink and the citizen developers to grow. In this scenario. We can see a situation where a smaller pool of people know how to “code,” while a bigger pool of people build applications on top of easy-to-use platforms.

A lot of users who work on no-code/low-code don’t have a technical background. What can no-code/low-code development suites do to ensure minimal technical debt?

Education around use cases is especially important. What’s so promising about these platforms is that they can solve a wide variety of complex problems. If you have a better way to work, then the configuration of the platforms can work better alongside you. But most people need some sort of roadmap or a common use case that they can rally around and emulate.

It’s also important that companies instill a broader culture of collaboration and curiosity. Technical debt is diminished when people genuinely believe that technology can help solve their problems. But many organizations are wired to work around specific processes and frameworks, which can stifle not only the desire to do things differently, but the ability to innovate alongside colleagues and solve complex problems together.

No one feels motivated to tackle technical debt if they don’t believe that their company can do things more effectively. In that case, a company has a much bigger cultural issue than just technological adoption.

In your experience, are users looking for a more holistic package, or do they prefer different solutions for each aspect of development?

Our experience is that people want a consistent experience with the platform, but they want the ability to customize the platform to meet their needs. The end result is an ecosystem of complementary applications that can be customized as business needs change.

One byproduct of citizen development is the potential duplication of the systems and tools in place, especially at enterprise scale. Therefore, it’s important to not only look at what each line of business is using, but what exists across a corporate IT environment. The good news is that many no-code/low code platforms are designed with collaboration and integration in mind, so an IT leader can have a consistent experience with the level of customization that each user needs to make it worthwhile.

Which other services do you think could be offered along with no-code/low-code to make it a more attractive package for app development?

Many leading no-code/low code platforms pride themselves on the number of integrations they offer with various tools and infrastructures. These integrations vary widely in terms of capability and level of technical sophistication.

Since we subscribe to the philosophy that the future of no-code/low code is through empowered citizen development, we’re very bullish on the value of collaboration and productivity tools..

Regardless of how sophisticated or easy-to-use a platform is, we also offer a variety of supplemental enablement services to help improve adoption and realize business value faster. Enablement services offer a mix of training and onboarding support, technical consulting, best practices around governance, ongoing customer success management for success planning, and business impact analysis.

Another area that can really change the game when offered along with a no-code/low code tool is machine learning. We all know data is king, so addressing how you can make it work harder for you and your organization.

What sort of metrics would an IT department look at to gauge the success of no-code/low-code development tools in their workspace?

Companies need to think about adoption in terms of productivity and business results, not just user totals or tallying up completed tasks. Think about the hours saved in a day, week or month, or the number of people and teams that are now working together. At the end of the day, the best metrics are the KPIs more connected with business results and increased efficiencies.

Zoe Clelland, vice president product and experience, Nintex

Which are your favorite no-code/low-code tools to work with?

I’m going to be biased. I would say out in the wild, I’m probably seen as a technologist. But amongst all these engineers, I don’t code. I’ve never coded. So with Nintex, the idea that I can come in and build with those products and use those products is phenomenal.

I think the tools that give me the most sense of pride that I’ve created is with forms. So I’ll talk about Nintex forms, but it can be any digital forms, where you can go in and just use modern computer gestures, and it’s super simple. I want a button here, I want this here, I build this all out. And I published that. And now thousands of people all over the world can put information into that and have the information land where I need it..

The power of that, as simple as it sounds, is really exciting. I think those types of things where you can create little apps or little things by yourself as a business user, that just get you more and more excited about it.

So I think for everybody, their favorite local tools would be the ones that allow them to produce something exceptional, either on their own or within their skill set.

Is the rise of no-code/low-code impacting the number of people working in IT?

I don’t think so. It’s very similar in my mind to robotic process automation (RPA). When RPA was rolled out, there was a lot of concern that the bots were taking over and many people would lose their jobs. What we’ve all learned is that’s not true. The bots are going to take the crappy, monotonous work that you don’t want to do, and that frankly, you weren’t hired for, and let you use your big brain to do other things.

I have a lot of faith in human capability. I always assume that, no, it’s going to shift where work gets done and how it gets done. But it’s not it’s not going to change the fact that we’re always going to need people with those skills for the more complicated end of the spectrum.

Can no-code/low code reduce the current engineering bottleneck, or is that still a few years away?

Yes, it can. It reduces it potentially in a different way than just solving all problems. So if you think about engineering or IT having 10,000 hours of work requested from them, they just can’t get to 5,000 of those hours at any point.

No-code/low code will allow the business to serve some of their own needs and free up the IT department for some of the more complicated or sophisticated work that needs to be done. The bottleneck will change in some ways, but it’s not going to diminish the demand around IT and engineering. They’re just going to start doing higher value work.

If this technology fulfills its promise, what changes do you expect to see in the day-to-day work of a traditional software developer?

It’s going to allow them to use their big brain for the work that needs big brains. I don’t think that anyone’s work is going away. I think it just allows everyone to live up to their potential rather than doing the day-to-day to serve all the other teams.

How much of the work that you manage is done via no-code/low-code at present? In 2031, will developers still be required to learn how to code?

There’s going to be a million places that still need code to be written. With no-code/low-code, we can enable them to do more of it more quickly, because there’s just less demand from the rest of the business for the easier tasks.

A lot of people who use no-code/low-code don’t have a technical background. What can no-code/low-code development suites do to ensure minimal technical debt?

I think it is going to be around user experience. The worst thing you can do is have someone come into a platform that’s supposed to be easy for them to use, and let them wander off and do crazy things that the system should not let them do.

So it’s about the guardrails, the way we think about it here is very much around the persona. So what do I want someone like me, a business user, to be able to come in and do? And what is the point where you want to be very clear with me that this area is not for you, please don’t stuff a bunch of JavaScript in here? You should have a user experience that is tailored to those personas and helps them stay in their lanes, and helps them not get out ahead of it.

When I’m building those tools, I’ll go pretty far and I’ll build Nintex solutions. I’ll get to a place sometimes where I need IT, or I need a developer. So then it’s much easier for them as well, because they can make sure that I don’t mess up the hard bits, but that they’re integrated in there. It really is about tailoring the experience in terms of what you can access, what you can see, what language is being used, and how you are guided through the tools for your own safety.

In your experience, are users looking for a more holistic package, or do they prefer different solutions for each aspect of development?

We very much believe in a broad platform for automation and low-code. But we’ve also seen that unless an organization is working on their digital transformation strategy at the top level, whether that’s CIO or CTO, you aren’t necessarily all talking about what you’re using and what you’re doing.

So even for Nintex, we will often go into an organization, and there will be different teams that have different or the same Nintex products, and they don’t know and they’ve never talked to each other about them.

Right now, we’re still at a place where people have disparate tools sometimes, just because they don’t know better. So they’re choosing different things based on their preference, or what they’ve used before, or who their manager likes.

Sometimes, if you end up in a low-code space that is overly tailored to non-technical users, the more technical folks will have to go with other tools. So that balance is really important for keeping everyone in their safe lanes while enabling them to go further if they need to.

What sort of metrics would an IT department look at to gauge the success of no-code/low-code development tools in their workspace?

There are a few things we would want to look at. The throughput from the organization, in particular. Instead of just looking at what it is building, is the organization getting more solutions solving more problems out there?

I’m getting a sense of governance and security. So you should be looking at whether this is all stable. If everyone is doing things that are okay and within our policies. So that governance thing just keeps rearing its head a little bit.

And this is a little bit hard, because once the business can serve themselves, they tend to stop talking to IT. They don’t necessarily want to get in the queue; they don’t want to have to deal with the teams, as nice as they may be.

So it’s good to understand and make sure you know what’s the throughput on the business side as well in terms of the problems they’re solving and solutions they’re putting out versus the IT teams.

Basically, you want to get insight into the complexity of the types of problems that the IT teams can now focus on, I think those would be great KPIs to understand how you’re moving towards the solutions and the kind of low-code ecosystem that you want to have.

Bruno Vieira Costa, founder and CEO, Abstra

Which are your favorite no-code/low-code tools to work with?

I’m very biased toward Abstra not just because I made it, but also because it brings the most important aspect of low-code I’ve always been looking for: collaboration.

But we have inspiration on low-code space: game engines. Tools like Unity or Unreal Engine shine by allowing visual abstractions easy for artists and developers to collaborate on while still being professional tools.

We do something very similar, Abstra take care of layouts and visual parts while letting developers keep their tooling.

Is the rise of no-code/low-code impacting the number of people working in IT?

Yes. I learned how to code early and never engaged with it until I knew about game engines. This made me feel way more comfortable learning “high code” with the shallower learning curve low-code affords.

Even as a young company, we have many examples of programmers who started their technical careers because of Abstra.

So definitely, low-code is a great way to start coding and gather interest from new professionals.

Can no-code/low code reduce the current engineering bottleneck, or is that still a few years away?

It depends. When people have better tools, the demand for tooling can actually increase.

The same applies to software. Low-code is allowing businesses that could never think about building their own software to actually build and be productive.

On the other hand, lowering the learning curve can have a huge impact on how many people are available on the market.

If this technology fulfills its promise, what changes do you expect to see in the day-to-day work of a traditional software developer?

They will focus on building abstraction and more complex tasks. Today, most of the work engineers do is build CRUDs and trivial stuff, because these mid-tier problems are solved in theory (no innovation) but not in practice (no automation). This is directly affected by low-code.

How much of the work that you manage is done via no-code/low-code at present? In 2031, will developers still be required to learn how to code?

Most of it! We built Abstra on top of a low-code back-end solution. We use low-code infrastructure providers as landing page builders. Also, all our internal tooling and all sidekick apps are built on Abstra.

A lot of users who work on no-code/low-code don’t have a technical background. What can no-code/low-code development suites do to ensure minimal technical debt?

When the person wants to learn software but just doesn’t have a technical background, low-code can be a great tool to teach these concepts and allow early practice.

Even when this is not the case, no-code tools can help you with common but still abstract use cases such as landing pages, forms, spreadsheets, etc.

In your experience, are users looking for a more holistic package, or do they prefer different solutions for each aspect of development?

There is no universal rule. In general, startups just want to ship their products faster, so they are very likely to experiment with all kinds of tools to produce results quickly. On the other hand, big companies have a lot of friction when introducing new tools, so more holistic tools with broad scopes are welcomed. There are more exceptions than rules. We are betting on making an ecosystem of tools for “low-coding”.

Which other services do you think could be offered along with no-code/low-code to make it a more attractive package for app development?

No-code, like many new tools, lacks professionals and tooling, which makes more skeptical engineers think they can’t compete with “high-code” approaches. So any tool that offers professional services (or partners), just like integration tooling, is in a great position.

What sort of metrics would an IT department look at to gauge the success of no-code/low-code development tools in their workspace?

  • Productivity: how much faster can some technical folk build.
  • Accessibility: how easy it is to train or find someone trainable for this work.

At Abstra, we bet on collaboration, which makes most of the work feasible for less technical people, while we keep the flexibility that programming brings.

David Hsu, founder and CEO, Retool

Can no-code/low code reduce the current engineering bottleneck, or is that still a few years away?

Low-code can absolutely help reduce the current engineering bottleneck. However, this is only possible once an organization sets realistic expectations and implements efficient processes.

Any engineer or technical person can work on tooling on their own. However, at its best, a low-code platform can reduce the amount of meetings, sprints, and single points of failure that an engineer endures when building an internal tool. For example, we often see both one-person teams (Skywalker Sound) and larger teams (Coinbase) using low-code to add significant leverage for their engineering teams.

Even taking these advantages into account, low-code platforms are not a silver bullet. If an engineering team does not invest in properly integrating a low-code platform into its data sources while also creating the space or processes for engineers to deploy new tools, the platform cannot reach its full potential.

If this technology fulfills its promise, what changes do you expect to see in the day-to-day work of a traditional software developer?

Software engineers will move higher up in the stack, which will make them much more efficient. This has been the history of programming for the past 30 to 40 years: Developers become ever more leveraged and effective.

For example, if you’re writing some of the front-end logic on airbnb.com, you’re not using WebAssembly (a perfectly good language); you’re using JavaScript. That’s because JavaScript is much higher level, and enables developers to be substantially more productive. We think that most internal software in the world should be programmed at a much higher level.

As software engineers move higher up in the stack, they’ll also write less boilerplate code, and focus on what’s specific to their business. That allows engineers to focus on what’s specific and important to their business, instead of the primitives that should just work.

Either of these changes is huge on its own. Together, they increase the quality and quantity of work each engineer contributes.

How much of the work that you manage is done via no-code/low-code at present? In 2031, will developers still be required to learn how to code?

Low-code is one way to solve problems. Textual, written code solves some problems better than visual programming, and coding will not go away. If you’re writing software for the space shuttle, for example, you should probably be coding in a low-level language. But if you’re just changing a column in a database, a high level language is probably a better fit.

Like we’ve seen over the last decade, how much people have to code (versus borrowing frameworks, libraries, open source), will continue to evolve. So perhaps the way people learn to code will need to evolve.

In any case, visual programming is not a silver bullet. Textual code is an elegant solution for a lot of problems and we should assume that a mix is the likely future.

A lot of users who work on no-code/low-code don’t have a technical background. What can no-code/low-code development suites do to ensure minimal technical debt?

Not all low-code platforms are geared towards non-technical builders, and focusing on non-technical builders can accrue a lot of technical debt quickly.

What can be done, however, is decide which technical debt is worth the flexibility low-code confers, and which technical debt does not reach that threshold. For example, giving non-technical builders the ability to design and define their own interfaces feels very worth it from where we’re standing.

On the other hand, we find that letting non-technical developers manage integrations, data flow, business logic, and CRON jobs — without some level of technical oversight or guardrails — is not worth the technical debt.

We believe that low-code platforms that take software development seriously will encourage developers to implement and connect said platforms to the right data while managing the platform like a system. This gives non-technical builders the opportunity to build any interface they need.

In your experience, are users looking for a more holistic package, or do they prefer different solutions for each aspect of development?

This depends wholly on a company’s unique mix of use cases, technical expertise, and market requirements (e.g. privacy regulation). The less critical the workflow (or the data powering it), the more companies are comfortable using your database option or deploying on the cloud.

The more mission-critical or high-volume the use case is, the more companies want to do error logging, branch-based commits, debugging, and other workflows alongside the app building — most likely with their tool of choice versus your own.

Which other services do you think could be offered along with no-code/low-code to make it a more attractive package for app development?

There is a huge ecosystem of software development tools available today, and many of the current best practices in software are difficult or impossible in most low-code platforms. Services that allow developers to follow their company’s software lifecycle 1:1 with a low-code platform would help make it a more attractive long-term solution for app development.

What sort of metrics would an IT department look at to gauge the success of no-code/low-code development tools in their workspace?

We find three metrics provide the strongest success gauges for IT departments:

  • Time to Value
  • Engineering Time
  • Speed of Execution for the business problem solved.

Hsu also had a few further comments on the space.

No-code/low-code approaches often get lumped together as a single category: tools that try to empower non-developers to build things that previously only developers could build. But it turns out that writing code is a pretty effective way to get computers to do things. Maybe you can get to 50%, 60%, or 70% without writing any code, but to get that last 30% or 40% that’s really custom to the specific needs of your business, you’re probably going to need to write some code.

We see that as an opportunity, not a liability. It’s wonderful that no-code tools enable more people to build useful software. But combining the advantages of a visual programming environment and traditional code is a really powerful idea.

We believe that the future of low-code is in being a force multiplier for developers and technical builders: helping them move much faster, spend less time on the tedious and repetitive tasks of programming, and ultimately build a lot more software.

Trisha Kothari, co-founder and CEO, Unit21

Which are your favorite no-code/low-code tools to work with?

I’m a huge fan of Webflow, which our website runs on. What I really like about it is that you can easily go in and modify components of the website without having to keep webadmin on demand. The other no-code tool that I really like is Zapier. We leverage that specially for one-time transformations or API uploads, etc.

Is the rise of no-code/low-code impacting the number of people working in IT?

I think so. One of our customers is Lili Bank, which is a bank for freelancers. They were able to leverage our platform, which is a no-code operations tool for fraud teams. What they found was that they were able to hire better people who were less SQL experts and more business fraud experts. The historical way that people would hire for fraud is to look for technical skills. What we’ve seen with no-code is that it enables the upskilling of non-technical people to have access to things that have been historically created by engineering.

Can no-code/low code reduce the current engineering bottleneck, or is that still a few years away?

We’ve already seen that happen. Our customers are able to get up and running really easily. We have one customer that has a case study on how it previously took them days to deploy a rule, and now they could easily deploy it within an hour.

If this technology fulfills its promise, what changes do you expect to see in the day-to-day work of a traditional software developer?

Software development is going to become more generalized because it will not be primarily re-coding a website or writing a rule using Python scipts, SQL queries, etc. It’ll be available to people who’ve been historically gated out. So software engineering is going to change significantly.

How much of the work that you manage is done via no-code/low-code at present? In 2031, will developers still be required to learn how to code?

We leverage a lot of vendors that are either completely no-code or have some components of no-code. It will be very difficult to move core product development to no-code, but I do think all of the operations of the business will be moved over to no-code.

A lot of users who work on no-code/low-code don’t have a technical background. What can no-code/low-code development suites do to ensure minimal technical debt?

It’s not a new technology; it is a product philosophy. So you have to ensure that you are enabling people to get up to speed with a product very quickly. Most of our customers are really interested in what we are doing and are excited to finally be empowered to do things that have been historically gated by engineering.

However, we find that there are some people who have a little bit of a learning curve because they’ve never worked on development. They’ve always relied on their in-house engineering teams or professional services. There is going to be a really big need for a proper on-ramp to no-code products to ensure minimal technical debt.

In your experience, are users looking for a more holistic package, or do they prefer different solutions for each aspect of development?

It really varies based on what they are looking for. We find that smaller companies are looking for a more holistic package, but for large companies, they may want a best-in-class solution.

Which other services do you think could be offered along with no-code/low-code to make it a more attractive package for app development?

Training. Training is going to be key, and will ultimately be the differentiator between companies.

What sort of metrics would an IT department look at to gauge the success of no-code/low-code development tools in their workspace?

Time saved in development. For example, for our customers, it is often the time taken for a rule to be deployed. We look at what was it before and what it is now and the impact of that.

What happens if you can catch fraud faster? What happens if you don’t have to wait for three days for a fraud rule to be deployed?