5 Ways You Can Boost Your Agile Development Using Low-Code

Low-Code application development was normalized in 2020—and it continues to pick up speed. Forrester predicts that by the end of 2021, 75 percent of development shops will use Low-Code  (up from just 44 percent in 2020)

Many organizations are only scratching the surface of Low-Code’s power. Why? Because they’re leveraging Low-Code with traditional high-code development practices. You’ll eventually be able to create beautiful and enterprise grade apps, but if you want to see its magic, you need a turbocharged tool that moves the needle for the business.

“According to Forrester Research, the Low-Code market is growing at nearly 40% to help organizations achieve this often elusive goal by reducing the time to build, test, and deploy valuable software.”

An organization where an agile culture has been adopted along with Low-Code technology, reaps the maximum benefit, resulting in faster decision making.

Research suggests that making the most of Low-Code with agile practices will accelerate development to achieve unparalleled time-to-value compared to those not using Low-Code.

Leveraging the power of Low-Code

Instead of putting more hours beyond the stipulated hours,  teams can improve their agile processes. Here are the 5 top key areas to maximize the quality with speed that comes when you build apps in a Low-Code platform.

Focus on IT Backlog

The product owner is important to succeed, especially when developing with Low-Code. It is necessary to have a dynamic product owner who is engaged, responsive, and who can take the lead and guide their team. For example, if you are refining the backlog once a week, then you need to speed up your cadence. Clearing the backlog is very important and requires a keen attention and a fast decision making process about the priority, content and acceptance criteria of your user stories. Delivering on Low-Code accelerates functionality for review and approval compared to traditional ways of delivering projects. Also, it is very important to understand that all team members should be able to write clear user stories with a clear acceptance criteria. Writing user stories in short with Low-Code simplifies development, increases throughput, and shortens testing in alignment with the faster development cycles.

Increase collaboration
Low-Code means business users, developers and IT can collaborate, innovate, and deliver enterprise grade applications so organisations can build apps faster and smarter. It allows business and IT to collaborate in real time using visual models to capture business requirements, quickly iterate and scale apps without losing the project’s essence. For example, some Low-Code platforms include workflow visualization where a developer can show business logic and data in the code visually in the layman’s format. The analyst can share his inputs and the developer can make the changes instantly and test it in real time to avoid any errors or defects and without losing any requirements that can lead to costly feedback cycles. Whereas in traditional coding platforms, the developer writes the code, tests the code, deploys the code, and the user reviews the page and this asynchronous feedback cycle goes on. Whereas, on a Low-Code platform the user and the developer can at the same time review a screen together and discuss the changes. Likewise other team members like QA team members can also collaborate in real time to fix the defects.

Eliminate (or Mitigate) Dependencies Early
At some point, there is dependency on integration, security, data dependencies, or other issues. If your team is not working on Low-Code, you need to pay more attention to identifying potential bottlenecks, track dependencies, increased technical debt, and duplicated testing. You will note that whatever was working in the past will likely be less effective than when developing with Low-Code.

Increase Ceremony Efficiency
Full fledged agile teams using Low-Code can consider shortening their sprint durations to enable them to deliver valuable software to users faster than traditional platforms. If you are writing more detailed user stories this can extend the time spent in backlog refinement and sprint planning because of the large amount of information available, which is not able to be digested by your team. It’s always better to focus on writing small user stories rather than writing over detailed user stories, so the team can save the time for backlog refinement and sprint planning. Hence, Low-Code enables strong collaboration during development to further refine the stories.

Effective Retrospectives
Developing an application in Low-Code requires a strong commitment  and continuous improvement to accelerate digital transformation. If you are not able to identify the improvement at the regular intervals and come up with new approaches, you will delay the development speed. 

Agile and efficient with Low-Code 

In an enterprise, Low-Code can diminish the common issues between business leaders and IT leaders. 

The situation worsens when IT teams lag in supporting and delivering the digital demands of the business. This  can hamper the ability of an enterprise to innovate or accomodate any on the fly change requests from customers. However, if an enterprise has adopted a Low-Code platform and imparts Agile culture, it can provide valuable flexibility for business decisions and enable faster time to value. Thus, IT leaders can guide the decision-making process on which systems should be bought versus built, and how to best integrate new acquisitions into the enterprise. If you are interested, you can connect with our experts and achieve maximum performance with Low-Code.