The rise of the citizen developer

Digital technology, while being commercially and socially highly disruptive, is also a major force for democratisation. In the early days, the internet was hailed as the global town square, where people could access information previously inaccessible to them, socialise with like-minded (or otherwise) communities, and drum up support for causes faster and more effectively than in the physical world.

This dismantling of barriers and democratisation of information soon extended into business. Industries once seen as overly specialised or restricted (such as travel, one of the earliest examples) became easier for new challengers to operate in – with a new online marketplace shaking oligopolies and making previously niche services more widely available.

Today, digitalisation continues to shake up once-established hierarchies, rules and regulations. Think smartphones replacing card machines, alternative payments putting pressure on the world’s established payment networks, or individuals having immediate access to state-of-the-art genAI technology.

In business, it’s SMEs that can benefit most from these trends, as the ability to procure advanced digital technology without breaking the bank can put them on a more equal footing with large companies.

Legacy low-code hits

With the rising popularity of low-code application platforms – those which don’t need a software developer’s in-depth know-how to operate – it’s now programming’s turn to become accessible for the hoi polloi. In this case, however, rather than toppling incumbents, the new technology is expected to fill some of the gaping IT skills gap.

Low-code application platforms (LCAPs) are not completely new: anyone who has created or collaborated on a spreadsheet application has already experienced it.

First launched in 1987, Microsoft Excel could be the earliest, and most successful, example of a low-code solution. The concise and simple language of its formulas and functions enable users to perform what are essentially common programming tasks.

Another example is Visual Basic for Application (VBA), a scripting language that has been part of the Microsoft Office Suite since the mid-1990s. Although it derives from the BASIC programming language, it uses visual tools rather than code to simplify programming even further. 

A boon for non-programmers, a bane for professionals?

It’s this visual coding functionality that VBA shares with today’s LCAPs, which are made up of chunks of pre-written code that even users with no coding experience can operate. In contrast to the “high code” employed by professional developers is text-based, low code platforms relying on visual coding are graphic user interface (GUI) based. To develop an app, users interact with intuitive icons, buttons and menus rather than having to fully learn a coding language.

This is great news for employees without any programming knowledge, who can leverage their domain knowledge and good understanding of the business by contributing directly to app development. LCAPs can help shrink development cycles, lower the costs of app development and increase the business’s potential to adapt to change.

Developers, however, aren’t entirely welcoming of these developments. As software architect Bas Meeuwissen explains, coding – the stretch of the full workflow that low-code platforms speed up – is only one phase of a complex, iterative DevOps process.

Professional developers like to point out that while these “citizen developers” may be able to take on the visual coding part of the development process, they are still responsible for the testing, deployment and security features of the application.

In a more recent article, Shiban Dhar points out how “the 10 per cent trap” – the difficulties inherent to the last 10 per cent of app development – could easily cancel out any gains achieved by visual coding, which makes up about 80 per cent of the process.

Professional developers often sound concerned that the onus will be on them to tidy up after citizen developers – and that this extra workload will leave them with less time to devote to high-value tasks. The integration of LCAPs with legacy systems can be cited as another pain point, further aggravated by the challenges of integrating the proprietary frameworks and languages of these platforms with existing code bases.

The more you can do inside an LCAP, the smoother your journey will be

But even professional programmers acknowledge the benefits LCAPs can offer, with the caveat that low code works best within the boundaries of a platform. In other words, the more the LCAP meets the use cases it’s implemented for, the better the results will be.

Naturally, more versatile platforms will cost more, which not all businesses will be able to afford. Yet how wide the selection of pre-figured building blocks is and how they accommodate the use case should always be the main consideration before procurement: see Gartner’s rankings of 17 17 LCAP vendor offerings based on nine critical capabilities that support evolving business needs.

To address major developer concerns, many platforms have already automated software testing and QA capabilities, as well as one-click deployment. Others have deep security and identity configuration features. Cutting edge LCAPs also offer hundreds of connectors – low-code tools enabling integration with enterprise applications, data sources and other cloud services.

Although low code solutions may be advertised as simple user interfaces that make coding child’s play, they require varying levels of training for non-developers. Therefore, the standard of support the platform provider offers, the quality of tutorials and whether there is a live chat available should also be important selection criteria.

However, as another Gartner reports on LCAPs points out, for 2023 and 2024 there has been ”a  focus on embedding machine learning into applications as well as features like generative AI to assist developers.” Based on Gartner’s prediction of increasing integrations with genAI – a technology that itself enables coding through written or verbal prompts – expect the empowerment of citizen developers and the democratising of scripting to ramp up, whether for good or ill.