Low Code Tools vs. Programming

It is no secret that the construction of software solutions has been of major importance for many years and that the pandemic has catapulted people into the digital world.

We see a significant increase in the Digital Transformation of companies, and this transformation undoubtedly leveraged the introduction of LOW CODE as a response to a paradigm shift regarding the way technology solutions are developed.

The main reasons driving the change have been:

• The gap between supply and demand for talent in the IT sector.
• The speed with which the market is demanding that applications be developed.

These two realities have accelerated the need to integrate Low Code tools, making it one of the best alternatives for companies.

What is Low code?

They are technological platforms that educe or eliminate the need for programming since they use visual interfaces that facilitate the construction of applications in an intuitive and simple way.

A new method that promises to respond to their needs is called Low Code, a system that eliminates manual coding to develop and deploy applications, as described by the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia in its articlewhich also states that companies see it as a great opportunity to help in their digitization process. This article gathers very relevant data from the study conducted by Barcelona Digital Talent "Analysis of Low Code" that brings us the most relevant benefits of this way of producing software:

• Help with the digital talent shortage.
• Significantly improved turnaround and response time. The study records that it has been: 10 times faster to create an application for customers.
• Generate a 74% reduction in costs.
• Low-Code supports any type of development, from prototyping solutions, programming strategic systems and culminating in the construction of software test robots.

This study also puts us in context about the barriers that the Low Codeas to face, which are mainly resistance to change on the part of engineers and doubts about its applicability. Barriers that are preventing Low code from reaching its full potential. Despite these preconceived limitations, the reality according to Gartner is that by 2025, 70% of new applications developed by organizations will use low-code or zero-code technologies

A glimpse of our market

However, if we analyze our reality, we will realize that in Latin America, in countries such as Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Uruguay and others, there are additional reasons for the adoption of Low Code.

In addition to the lack of human talent trained in programming and the growing demand of increasingly demanding customers, in our region the emergence of new generations of workers is added. The so-called millennials (born between 1981 and 1993) and young people of the so-called generation Z (born between 1994 and 2010), all digital natives. These workers are accustomed to a digital experience of the highest quality, expect immediate responses, so they require in their work performance agile tools, very easy to learn and very different from those available in traditional environments. This aspect is not minor, as it calls us to consider solutions with a short learning curve, which facilitate the transfer of knowledge for multidisciplinary teams, which usually rotate in very high percentages.

Thus, we can see two additional reasons for the adoption of the Low code:

• The generational ages and expectations of today's human resources.
• Time to learn the new tools.

The trend in QA and its future perspective
QA has become an essential, holistic, integral and indispensable activity. That is why it is becoming more and more important and requires more hierarchy, increasing the levels of investment. This investment will not only be in human resources, but rather in empowering those resources with Low Code, automation tools that allow functional profiles to perform tests from earlier stages, prioritizing automation for error prevention from the perspective of the business success criteria, rather than for clear detection of failures, tools conceived as part of a DevOps process and that are ultimately easy to use and scalable.

Companies know that they are not yet reaping the full benefits of automation, because it has been difficult to implement and very costly to maintain, since it is mostly developed to code by specialized automators, with low market availability, costly and with response times that do not match the needs of production output. Thus, there is a strong tendency to use people who know more about the business than about technology, and they are the right users for Low Code.

Today, with the accelerated pace of the world, the speed and efficiency provided by the Low Code, it is clear that the way forward is to use differential technologies and give the opportunity to change old paradigms.

All things considered, it would be a mistake to insist on the recipe of coding all development and testing, without involving Low Code solutions in the right measure, as it would be like going back to carts after having cars.

In this sense, even more inclusive possibilities than low code are opened up. In the case of testing, STELA, a ZERO CODE software automation tool, in addition to automating testing, is the simplest RPA to use.

STELA brings enormous benefits for teams, allowing functional profiles, without any technical knowledge, to build agile software robots.