Low Code, Meet DevOps!
By Alok Uniyal, SVP & Head – Process Consulting, Infosys
Alok leads the IT Process Consulting Practice at Infosys. He is also driving the Agile & DevOps Transformation at Infosys. As a seasoned IT Professional with rich experience in IT Consulting and transformation, Alok specializes in helping organizations embrace New Ways of Working, leveraging Lean, Agile, DevOps, and Design Thinking - toward greater Business Agility and resilience - translating to faster and better business outcomes. Over his 25 years of career, Alok has consulted many large corporations, globally.
The article explores the synergy between low-code/no-code development and DevOps. Uniyal highlights that while low code speeds up development, integrating DevOps enhances efficiency and quality through automation and feedback.
Riding on a substantial value proposition of speed, cost efficiency, productivity, and collaboration, low-code/no-code development is growing at a rapid clip. A leading market intelligence and consulting firm estimates that by 2025, organizations will build 70% of their new applications using low-code or no-code technologies, almost three times the level in 2020. This is causing justifiable concerns of how a large and growing shadow IT could impact an organization by replacing professional developers, increasing cybersecurity risk, inflating technical debt, bypassing governance, or even disrupting the business if coupled incorrectly with (main) IT applications without the knowledge of the IT organization.
Since there's no stopping low-code/no-code momentum, how can enterprises maximize the gains from citizen development while curtailing its risks?
One way is to extend the reach of formal IT into shadow IT, not to take it over, but rather, to lend a guiding hand.
This can happen in several ways — ensuring business developers use approved low-code/no-code platforms with robust inbuilt security and compliance that are integrated with enterprise IT and security systems. Other ways include getting pro-code developers to support shadow IT users in complex assignments and teaching business developers best practices in application design and development. Co-developing applications is another way, where business developers provide the requirements, while professional developers work on design, architecture, and complex programming activities.
Beyond this, organizations can apply the principles that have transformed pro-code development to low-code/no-code development and thereby compound its value. We are talking of DevOps, agile, and lean techniques.
Low-Code and DevOps, Really?
About the publication
DEVOPSdigest is an IT community blog which covers DevOps and related technologies and subjects. It shares industry news and allows technology analysts, consultants, users and vendors to discuss and inform one another about trends.
