Bassell Khachfeh, the Digital Solutions Manager at Omnix International, says LC/NC leads the development activity to be more logic focused than technical-focused
How do low code/no code (LC/NC) break down barriers and democratize the software creation process?
LC/NC platforms make the development process more visual and make technical functionalities like designing the object/database table creating a function and defining its parameters much easier. This leads the development activity to be more logic-focused than technical-focused.
With visualization of the code and making it much easier to understand and write, the gap between the business and IT becomes much smaller and the barriers start to fall when the business finds themselves able to understand the code and start participating to enhance it.
In some cases where the business has some skills in creating Excel files and using its functions (or similar skills), they find themselves able to even modify or write some parts of the code to create a function that they need. They also create a page that views the data they want to analyze which leads to democratizing the process of software creation.
How have LC/NC platforms evolved from niche tools into essential components of modern IT strategies?
LC/NC platforms have evolved a lot by monitoring the market and community needs and embracing their requirements like adding readymade connectors, Data hubs, mobile application development and the list goes on and on. This is in addition to always focusing on making the development process faster and closing more and more of the gap between the business and IT.
We have seen the LC/NC platform’s rapid evolvement, especially the current market leaders like Mendix and OutSystems with a lot of useful functionalities. It increases the development speed and breaches the gap between the business and IT. This made the market consider them as “The” tool for success and achieving their strategic goals.
What sort of impact is being felt across various sectors, from finance to healthcare to manufacturing when it comes to LC/NC platforms?
LC/NC platforms have massively contributed to various sectors where we have seen at least one or more of the big players in each sector to adapt one of the LC/NC platforms, such as ARAMCO, Aramex, ZURICH, various municipalities around the world, RTA (Dubai), e&, and SIEMENS.
These adaptations from big players have led to faster and more efficient services and a better experience provided to the customers, which led to higher customer satisfaction, higher revenue and a better market evolvement, in addition to providing a better working environment when it is used to develop internal systems.
How according to you can issues with security, compliance, and integration, be properly managed in an LC/NC ecosystem?
All of the LC/NC leading platforms have addressed the security, compliance, and integration challenges, and all of them have straightforward and easy-to-use security modules and configurations. They support all of the commonly used integration methods, and they are always enhancing and certifying their platforms with the highest compliance certificates. In addition to all of these points whenever they face a situation where their platform has a security thread, needs enhancement, or lacks certain compliances they respond to that situation promptly and engage in discussion on how to resolve it.
However, efforts for the platforms only will not be sufficient, the community, IT departments and software development companies need to make sure that their teams are properly and continuously trained to use these features.
How are technologies such as AI and ML further enhancing the capabilities of low-code platforms?
This topic will need a series of sessions to be covered properly as for sure AI/ML will not only be limited to increasing the development speed and code generation, it has a limitless sky when we speak about it with a lot of useful functionalities, however, we will list some of the important ones below:
- Code Review: One of the most needed functions in the development process is to review the code by a senior developer or the team lead before releasing it, especially the advanced areas like security configurations and Objects/DB tables design, however, this functionality always becomes a bottleneck due to the nature of software development team structure, AI/ML can massively contribute in this step and to make it faster and more efficient.
- Suggestions and Discussions: one of the most important steps in resolving any medium to high complexity challenge is the discussions that happen between team members which lead to very useful suggestions, most of these suggestions can come from experience, knowledge, or searching the internet, however, it is always limited to the team members efforts and knowledge, but with AI and ML this becomes a very useful and much more efficient process where you can discuss the issue with the AI/ML model and get the best solution and suggestion worldwide with a lot of examples from modern software projects.
- Learning and Improvement: Allowing the AI/ML module to go over the code and analyze it will allow it to continuously learn for the development team experience and learn from their behaviour for better and more relevant suggestions.
- Project and Resource Planning: Project and Resource planning somehow can be considered from the development process and can lead to its success or failure; a good plan and an efficient resource allocation are the main factors for a project to succeed and AI/ML can massively contribute in this area.
